Burkart—Streaming Music

This article is part of the “Emerging Issues” section of Music Research Annual. Articles in this section of the journal present critical analyses of topics that are beginning to attract scholarly attention and point ways forward for new music research.

Streaming Music: Will Digital Rights Management Have a Place in a Blockchained World?

Patrick Burkart

Abstract: Despite its many problems, digital rights management (DRM) still performs a critical role as the digital infrastructure for the delivery of commercial music streams. While DRM persists in the evolving “Celestial Jukebox,” however, the emergence of online micropayments accompanying decentralized finance (DeFi) raises the possibility of the superannuation of DRM as a technology practice built on a centralized exercise of access controls. Will DRM be deposed by DeFi? The first part of this article introduces the technology practices of DeFi music, examines the history of DRM, and makes a first approach to the question of the commensurability of the two types of system. Next, it explores the emergence of blockchain-based technologies at the center of DeFi, which engage with DRM in streaming music service platforms. Some aspects of DeFi may have the potential for either expanding the reach of DRM or limiting its importance. Both “fungible” (divisible) tokens and “non-fungible” ones (commonly known as NFTs) are explored for their utility in resolving problems left over from catalogs using DRM. After a brief survey of the field of players implementing some prototype DeFi music platforms, the article returns to the question of the commensurability with older, DRM-based systems and concludes with some ideas about the development of music streaming cultures with a communitarian ethos.

Keywords: popular music, blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, digital music rights, NFTs, P2P, streaming music, utopianism

Patrick Burkart is Professor of Communication and Journalism and Affiliated Professor of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University.

Burkart, Patrick. 2023. “Streaming Music: Will Digital Rights Management Have a Place in a Blockchained World?” Music Research Annual 4: 1–20.
ISSN 2563-7290

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Decentralized music streaming is an emergent topic of research with a nascent scholarly literature. Although streaming has been extensively covered in popular music studies, and blockchain finance and business technology topics have been broached by critical media studies, their intersection goes underexplored. This article explores some of the social and political issues at stake in the current (potential) growth phase of music streaming services that use decentralized and blockchain-based software infrastructure. The scope of the literature under discussion here includes writings from communication studies, business, and popular music studies. I review works in English on blockchain music distribution written by researchers from the United States, European countries, and India.

In discussing their work, developers of decentralized finance technologies (DeFi) represent them as diametrically opposed to digital rights management technologies (DRM); however, the two have much in common, and there is good reason to believe that the new capacities of DeFi will likely be yoked to serve the interest of the major players in the music industries. To make this argument, I rely in part on the work of Brian Winston ([1998] 2002), a historian of communication technology, and the Italian sociologist Paolo Magaudda (2019), who has researched the use of DeFi in popular platforms and the media industries from a historical perspective.¹ While the impetus for the creation of DeFi may appear to be the takeover and replacement of the core of digital and platform capitalism, its radical potentials are likely to be subverted by the interests of the status quo players and institutions.

Are DRM and DeFi Incommensurable Technology Practices?

Whereas the creators of DRM emphasize that ownership of and control over digital assets enables the experience of streaming music, enthusiasts for DeFi claim that their technology offers artistic empowerment. For example, media studies educator Andrea Johnson (2022, 51) exclaims that DeFi is a “new technology to expand your mind and your pocketbook all while holding on to your rights as a creator, so you [italics in the original] can monetize your art! Revolutionary!” Writing of DeFi streaming service Audius, an article in the Harvard Technology Review echoes the sentiment:

Not only could we potentially be looking at a more accessible and artistically diverse mainstream music industry, we could also see songwriting become a conversation between the artist and fan, rather than a one-way street. Audius is a platform that is currently aiming to do this and with nearly $10 million in crowdfunded investment. (Bibby 2021, under “3. Empowering Smaller Artists”)

This enthusiasm for a prototype technology comes at a time when DRM is still employed by online media streaming juggernauts such as Spotify, YouTube, Tidal, and Deezer but has been declared technically and culturally obsolete by music technologists working in developing countries (Rambhia et al. 2021). The enthusiasm for building a better “Celestial Jukebox” (see note 3) is reminiscent of the arrival of the decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) download era twenty-five years ago. Then, the “dot-com boom” supported new ventures promoting decentralized distribution and social capital built up from hoarding and sharing files (Bourdieu 1986). Now, a burst of capitalization from cryptocurrency markets has launched a prototyping period for decentralized authentication and payment for music. DeFi streaming comes with the return of hoarding and sharing, albeit with tokens and other cybernetic commodities. (A token is a digital “chit” or other kind of payment based on cryptocurrency.)

Financial technology firms (fintechs)—famous for making direct-payment apps on smartphones and cryptocurrency trading platforms—have also helped develop the software and proofs of concept for the construction of what I will refer to as the “DeFi music” experiment. DeFi uses cryptocurrencies, which are digital-only coins and tokens used for payment, accounted for in digital ledgers (databases) stored across multiple computers, using blockchain technology. Bitcoin is an example of these nongovernment-issued currencies and exchanges for them, joining a whirl of experimentation with bespoke cryptocurrencies released by music distributors and artists.

Today, DeFi music appears at the margins of the music industry and that portion of the software industry now launching decentralized applications for the blockchained, crypto-enabled “Web3.”² It can be read as the latest iteration of a familiar story about the excitement and curtailment of socially radical options and outcomes in the contemporary age. Winston’s ([1998] 2002) model of the socially conditioned diffusion of innovations can help us understand this. Winston construes the historical development of platforms as a process that goes from ideation to prototyping, spin-offs, and die-outs. Here, Winston argues, social and cultural factors exert braking or acceleration effects on the diffusion of communication technologies, and a “supervening social necessity” (13) helps ensure that an innovation is pressed into service and commercialized. A “law” of suppression of radical potentials helps ensure that innovations do not exert politically or economically revolutionary effects. In the modern history of communication technology, the radical potentials for any innovation reside as design options, which either are unimplemented and await social and cultural demands to unlock them or else are “designed out of the system” (59).

For example, Winston shows that something like what we would now call “streaming music” was designed out of the infrastructure of the public telephone system, and this occurred about the same time as radio arose to capture audiences ready to listen to music broadcasts. Here, the radical potentials for streaming music were built into the guts of the public switched telephone network (the lines and switches contributing to end-to-end telephony). In the 1930s, telephone music services could have given millions of telephone subscribers in Europe and the United States something like a “streaming” music service. The technical potentials for this resided partly in the addressability of the telephone network (i.e., the ability of any telephone to reach any number within the same network) and partly in the capability of the exchange to switch multiparty calls and link many telephone users together on the same connection. Prototypes of a telephone-based listening service for news, theater, concerts, lectures, and religious services existed in Europe and the US in the early twentieth century (Winston [1998] 2002, 59, 74). Potentially, any telephone subscriber could have eventually used the public switched telephone network to program their own niche material to their distinctive tastes—a radical potential of the communication technology, one that was particularly revolutionary for its time. Yet there was no supervening social necessity for nudging the system toward broad diffusion in this direction—not even for business use (59–60).

Meanwhile, radio broadcasts were offering their own “streaming” services (if you will), albeit for mass audiences and requiring purchase of a new and separate apparatus (the radio receiver set). Eventually radio broadcasting found enough commercial support from advertisers or state support from governments that it contributed to the suppression of the radical potentials represented by telephonic music streaming. The industrial needs of radio, together with other forces, like “inertia, lack of vision, [and] institutional constraints such as those imposed by the patent system” (Winston [1998] 2002, 57), conspired against the more radical potentials of telephony. Winston also suggests that “the limitations of entrepreneurialism” (58) led network designers to accept technical specifications that only allowed low-fidelity and point-to-point (telephone-to-telephone) connections; the cultural distrust of telephone calls in the Victorian age also played a role here (59).

Similar processes are occurring today. With increasing regularity, DeFi players, established “cloud” streamers such as Tidal, and payment vendors such as Block (formerly known as Square; Hussain, Culliford, and Dave 2021) are announcing strategic partnerships and acquisitions. Nevertheless, DeFi music is still the domain of the technorati, especially while services remain in a prototyping stage. Some younger music fans who are already accustomed to using cryptocurrency wallets on smartphones are most likely to have the capital, technology, and literacy to become DeFi music’s early adopters. Recently, DeFi music services like Audius music, Emanate, OPUS, Voice, Choon, Musicoin, and Ujo Music emerged to tap into this market (Creighton 2022).

Streaming music catalog access is currently controlled in a political economy of digital music distribution “infrastructure” (Burkart and McCourt 2004) that developed into a concentrated and only semi-regulated “Celestial Jukebox” (Burkart and McCourt 2006).³ Infrastructure, in the sense used here, represents enduring technology practices that are both necessary and sufficient to support the provision of commercial music delivery services and the industry standards for managing them. More specifically, customer relationship management (CRM) software (which supports customer contact, marketing, and digital commerce) and DRM software (which enforces conditional access to recorded music) have provided an interwoven infrastructure that developed from the era of online digital music sales via downloads to the present-day practice of digital music streaming services on hybrid, mobile networks.⁴ To the extent that DeFi supports, if not replicates, these interwoven functions, the CRM-DRM infrastructure can still be considered foundational, or “baked in,” to blockchain-based digital music streaming. While DeFi music may disrupt some familiar technology practices, DRM can also adapt and survive in new forms.

Hardware and software interfaces designed to accommodate DRM predominate consumption norms and other habits of accessing music (Morris 2015). DRM systems recognize and regulate roles further downstream from the creator and owner, including the distributor and consumer. Mobile platforms using conventional client-server distribution technology support additional links in the chain of custody, with extra roles for the DRM provider, app developer, app store, and distribution server (D’Orazio and Choo 2016). As consumers (or “users”), we encounter DRM when we stream content (or are blocked from doing so) from iTunes for Windows, Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and other “over-the-top” (OTT) commercial distributors running data services and commercial digital broadcast radio stations. Subscription cable and satellite networks and their internet channels also use DRM. In online music platforms like Spotify, DRM monitors authentication, device characteristics, consumption, and payment history, among other user attributes. In terms of its underlying technologies, DRM in the narrow sense (as a centralized, access-controlled, client-server architecture that works in a so-called software “stack”) is very different from peer-to-peer-based DeFi technologies. Ultimately, however, DeFi platforms can also be designed for the same ends, the individuation of the music “user” and increased control over the user’s data.

DRM was imposed before it was readily adopted and diffused. It became a consumption norm after many false starts, internecine battles among technology firms, and widespread user opposition (Gillespie 2007; Scharf 2022).⁵ DRM tracks the impulse to impose access controls centrally, from the top, as a socio-technical project with evolving infrastructures (Beniger 2009). In the case of streaming media, DRM has multiple functions to authenticate users and maximize intellectual property (IP) rights protections for content owners. For example, Microsoft Windows Media Format can restrict recording to audio outputs, restrict playback to one device and one set of device drivers, restrict playlist burning, revoke licenses, restrict backup or storage of licenses, and enable DRM for live and low-latency audio (Microsoft 2019). After a US Supreme Court ruling that shut down the legal business model of Napster (the most widely known P2P service), the major labels found a “supervening social necessity” (Winston [1998] 2002) for imposing new technical access controls through DRM like Microsoft’s. At first, DRM backfired. It artificially segmented the market for digital music downloads based on each of the major label’s catalogs and relied on incompatible standards, devices, and regional restrictions. Users often needed multiple services to access music from different labels. This balkanization of digital music markets followed the failure in the late 1990s and early 2000s of the Secure Digital Music Initiative to harmonize standards (Burkart and McCourt 2006). Some of those problems were later remedied through court-ordered music catalog cross-licensing (Sarikakis 2015).

Will DRM be loosened or reconceptualized in an emerging DeFi music experiment? Magaudda (2019, 59–60) has explored developments in the blockchain infrastructure and the five “technological promises” that it holds for the music industry and music fans:

• “perfect [copyright] royalties distribution” based on “a system of fast and frictionless royalty payments running on a dedicated blockchain platform with smart contracts”;
• “a perfect music database” and “certified transparent catalogue of all music production and ownership”; and
• “full transparency over the music value chain.” This would lead to
• “access to alternative sources of money for artists and creators” and
• “the elimination of piracy” (copyright infringement) through “increased control over the music” via smart contracts. (59–60; italics in the original)

Taken together, these promises represent a renewed devotion to financial ideals supported by the technical functions of DRM. In fact, one could say that the blockchain’s promises are commensurate with the values that shaped the previous infrastructures. Were they to stabilize and grow as a technology practice, and with access to back catalogs of popular music, DeFi music platforms could bypass current architectures and utilize a decentralized authentication system disconnected from existing DRM systems. Moreover, they could commingle with services that use access controls which, formally speaking, are separate from the DRM “middleware” applications that rely on technical standards by companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple and currently run the global streamers. In fact, DRM software is typically accompanied by access controls that are handled separately from the DRM servers themselves. For example, techniques like mandatory user identification, streamed content encryption, hard-coded keys, cookie-based authentication time-outs, premium content access restrictions, and data obfuscation are used globally by music streamers and work independently of a DRM installation (Dabholkar, Kakarla, and Saha 2021, 9), and individually or together, these technology practices can exclude non-payers from accessing protected content.⁶ DeFi music platforms could design engineering hooks into these mechanisms without the formal integration of a centralized DRM server.

DeFi music streaming, then, is emerging as a collection of prototyped platforms financed and launched by music industry outsiders, who embrace a recommodification of music publishing, distribution, and financing, while reviving some of the conviviality of the old, “flat” P2P distribution arrangements characteristic of the Napster era of the early 2000s.⁷ For search and retrieval functions, DeFi music uses the “flat” (or “centerless”) network architecture and P2P protocols similar to popular file-sharing applications like Napster or Limewire. But DeFi access controls can be operated conditionally and in real time by token requirements and smart contracts or by self-executing programs stored on a blockchain that automate an agreement when certain conditions are met. The old P2P music search and retrieval innovator Limewire has itself adopted blockchain technology and offers a subscription music streaming platform, with its own tokens.

To Magaudda’s (2019) five promises of the blockchain, there deserves to be added at least one more: it is just one more technological scheme aiming to satisfy the need to experience what the late political economist of communication Vincent Mosco (2005) called the “digital sublime.” According to Mosco, the digital sublime is an expectation of an ecstatic personal experience with communication technology conditioned by mythological thinking, marketing and boosterism, and what Marxist psychology would refer to as commodity fetishism. My friendly amendment to Magaudda’s theory—this sixth promise—is that DeFi extends the technologically utopian tradition, which promotes “a seamless and elegant digital enclosure [in which] [t]he digital sublime feeds users’ fantasies of the perfect search, the ultimate discovery, and instantaneous and complete gratification through immersion in millions of intangible digital commodities” (Burkart 2014a, 405).

DeFi Is Not DRM: Under the Hood

Functionally, DeFi systems are purposefully decentralized and run on protocols requiring community governance and buy-in, through infrastructure investments, labor, or both. Unlike P2P services such as Napster, which failed to account for intellectual property flows to the satisfaction of the largest record labels of its day (Universal Music Group, Sony Music, EMI, BMG, and Warner Music Group), DeFi P2P platforms calculate and pay royalties in real-time microtransfers of cryptocurrency and, potentially, in direct payments to each recipient. Only recordings registered with a DeFi music service are visible and available to that service; most catalog content tied to traditional accounting methods and intermediaries is not available on DeFi music platforms. Typically, DeFi streamers only handle content that is authorized by single copyright owners, registering and tracking new releases on public blockchain for record-keeping.

DeFi streaming platforms thus make a clean break from legacy catalogs with DRM entanglements, which are inaccessible to centerless distribution. Many legacy catalogs use files that, in the recording studio, were digitally watermarked with DRM. For example, the Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) system by Meridian Audio enables mastering facilities to sign a master key to the recording, which is verifiable with a checksum. The end-to-end system ensures that no alterations have been made to the original file. MQA is currently used by the (now three) major labels—Universal, Warner Brothers, and Sony Music (see Roberts 2021)—and also implemented in the Tidal music service.

Because DRM typically runs in client-server architectures, and not in flat P2P network architectures, DRM has posed a long-standing design challenge for DeFi application developers. Software researcher Abba Garba and his colleagues (2021) propose a scalable DeFi DRM system based on watermarking. Such a system would take advantage of digital ledger technology to satisfy the requirements of transparency while “securing” copyrighted materials from piracy, which would satisfy DeFi music’s promises of perfect royalties distribution operating through “a perfect music database” and a “certified transparent catalogue” leading to “full transparency over the music value chain” (Magaudda 2019, 59–60). Sony, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Huawei, Kodak, and others have filed patents for blockchain-based DRM, and Kodak has deployed a beta project for image rights (Coin Insider 2021), but these efforts remain under private, corporate controls (Finck and Moscon 2019).

Catalog content managed with smart contracts supports decremented payment accounts, disbursements from a royalties accounting system, cryptocurrency tokens, loyalty programs, digital collectibles, special access to resources, and access to artists and their events. The programmability of smart contracts make them ideal for the design and development of decentralized applications (dApps), which allow for more shared, and less individuated, music experiences. For example, Audius supports file posting, artist pages, artist following, reposting, playlists, curated playlists, auto-recommendations, remix contests, cryptocurrency prizes for users, and crypto revenue-sharing arrangements for contributors to resources on the platform (which are called “content nodes” and “discovery nodes”).

For fans contributing extra money and time to their fandom practices, DeFi supports the exchange of digital “merch,” such as avatars, logos, tags, and NFTs, which fans could use to signal their in-group status (or display conspicuous consumption). Strategic awards systems implemented in video games and interactive worlds provided a template for the gamification of DeFi music (Binance Research 2022). DeFi music also creates opportunities for developing secondary markets in audiovisual resale, the revival of “first sale” recordings still offered by used record stores (van Haaften-Schick and Whitaker 2022), and tertiary markets in remixed music, video games, and films. Music gamification thereby contributes to the promotion of the fantasy that musical fandom and play in digital worlds is “work” that can “earn” capital in the system, thus contributing to the fulfillment of Magaudda’s fourth promise of blockchain (new sources of money for artists and creators; see below).

A market survey of DeFi music systems—both defunct (such as Choon and Ujo Music) and still extant (Emanate and Musicoin)—yielded no examples of their use of DRM as of 2021 (Soden 2021), although Tidal’s potential DeFi offering via the payment processing company Block may provide an early prototype of a hybrid distribution system. The Big Three record labels, unsurprisingly, have not yet endorsed DeFi with long-term commitments, nor have the giant music streamers. Moreover, those streamers have held fast to DRM while making only small and experimental commitments to DeFi infrastructure. In this context, a broader diffusion of DeFi music would alter habits of listening for millions of music fans. If DeFi’s collectivist project seems to be moving streaming music infrastructures from an individuated model to a model supporting more sharing, which habits of listening already in place stand to be affected?

More Insular Habits of Listening

DRM has conditioned consumption norms for streaming music; technical access controls pervade music software interfaces in ways that have led to music rituals and other identity-forming relationships to music becoming increasingly alienated and isolated from communities (Drott 2018).⁸ DRM is one of the last steps in individuating music as an aesthetic experience. Previously, the migration of musical “performance” from live concerts to recorded formats took gramophone and stereo sets into the household. The Walkman took individuation further still, creating a fully personalized experience, which was later computerized with Napster. In tandem with changing recording/playback systems, intellectual property protections have deepened the processes of individuation. With iTunes downloads and, later, with the streaming services, DRM further insulated listeners from what might have become more social, convivial, or shared music experiences, since it is designed to exclude nonpaying users through an automated process.

Moreover, DRM restricts access to audio recordings outside of public librarianship and open music commentary, thus reducing opportunities for parasocial relationships around music, and even limits genre hybridization. Consider the user authentication process for accessing music streams. Here, streaming DRM-enabled players retrieve operating instructions from a compatible online platform to identify available content for the authenticated user. Browser extensions, plug-ins, and apps then receive instructions to disable recording and enable playback for various kinds of gear, such as computers, mobile devices, smart TVs, digital assistants like Amazon Alexa, and OTT cable television boxes.

The market for streaming DRM is concentrated, dominated as they are by software and media industry incumbents: Adobe, Apple, DivX, Google, Intertrust, Microsoft, and Verimatrix. Common audio standards include the HTTP Live Streaming protocol (HLS), which was developed by Apple in 2009 for its iPhone 3 release, Apple FairPlay, Adobe PrimeTime, Microsoft PlayReady, Marlin (an open-source standard), and Google WideVine, which was adopted by Spotify (Dabholkar, Kakarla, and Saha 2021). Tidal uses TidalHiFi for most of its streams, and—for a small number of items in its catalog—MQA. These standards are not interoperable; vendor lock-in restricts many available channels upstream and downstream from users (Müller, Janczura, and Ruppel 2020).

As prevalent as it is, full-strength DRM is still not ubiquitous. Pirate streams and downloads continue to permeate the internet. Popular streaming services in India and some other large national markets for music use weak implementations of DRM, if any at all (Dabholkar, Kakarla, and Saha 2021). However, the global streamers have secured distribution access to transnational markets by committing to the music labels’ requirement that they continue to use strong DRM. A study of Indian streaming services by computer scientists Ahaan Dabholkar, Sourya Kakarla, and Dhiman Saha (2021) distinguishes between non-DRM content security mechanisms, weak DRM, and strong DRM, with the non-DRM and weak DRM implementations prevailing due to planning failures, a rush to take new services to market, and, among services that tried strong DRM, the “alienation” and subsequent loss of those subscribers who used cheaper playback devices (10). Audius, still a niche player with under ten million streaming users and 250,000 artists worldwide (Irwin 2022), lacks music authentication (such as Google-YouTube’s Content ID) and access controls typical of DRM, allowing pirated tracks and unauthorized remixes to become inextricably embedded in the blockchain (Deahl 2019).

With all of this in mind, the next section of this essay addresses how the impetus to concentrate and centralize access controls through industry ownership concentration and tiered, client-server architectures might give way to a more decentralized model. Flat network architectures support technical access controls managed through P2P Ethereum or Solana smart contracts, rather than through centralized DRM integrations.⁹ Is this alternative infrastructure accommodating enough to help maintain industry-standard controls over music distribution, as legacy catalogs have required? Or is there a supervening social necessity for exchanging legacy DRM systems for DeFi? Below, I address this topic and also return to the question of whether the two infrastructures are technically and socially incommensurable.

Infrastructure for a Post-DRM World

DRM-based platforms use centralized client-server architectures for storing content and metadata, while databases are employed to facilitate user authentication. In DeFi-based platforms, distribution systems are also separate from catalogs of copyrighted music and metadata, and because no useful rights databases exist yet, DeFi systems do not yet know about copyright matters or rights certification (Ciriello et al. 2023). In theory, a protocol such as that devised by the database project Tendermint could map a DeFi system’s content to contractually negotiated rules and relationships encoded into a P2P distribution system, so that that system would behave as if it were governed by a copyright. (The project Tendermint provides an interoperable platform for handling token-based transactions.) This imaginary IP engine could treat digital assets published to blockchains exactly as a DRM system treats them—as subject to licensing rules that could be enforced through conventionally designed workflows and authentications. Where conflicts would emerge between copyright claims or between payment and open access, the IP engine could enforce access controls using stored rules and encryption, neither of which by itself would constitute DRM.

A DeFi music model presents an opportunity to fuse aspects of DRM and CRM, in situations where tokens are circulated and tracked for analysis between influencers such as artists, celebrities, spokespeople, and fans. “Friendly sharing” arrangements among fans and catalog owners have already been demonstrated in traditional platform environments (Wikström 2013, 150–71). Friendly sharing and other transactional features and functionalities of platforms can simulate aspects of the sociality of music scenes (Straw 1991), especially where cultural capital accumulation can be gamified. Spotify has perfected many of the contemporary practices, even in a DRMed environment (Ferm Almqvist, Leijonhufvud, and Ekberg 2020). There may be room for still-friendlier sharing designs to emerge, partly mediated with tokens. Feeding two birds—or two DeFi promises—with one seed, the implementation of tokenomics by incumbent players using DRM might even mitigate IP leakage while simultaneously promoting customer loyalties. (The term “tokenomics” refers to design considerations in blockchain-based platforms from the standpoint of the circulation and exchange of tokens and NFTs.)

Roles for NFTs

Due to their popularity, NFTs deserve a closer look in this review of DeFi’s promises and prospects. NFTs are being marketed as “collectibles,” and, beginning about 2019, some of their sales efforts began attracting headline-grabbing prices. Understanding the legal pitfalls of the contemporary NFT ecosystem is the first step in unlocking its potential. Like fungible tokens (cryptocurrency coins), NFTs are exchangeable stores of value and, moreover, can provide digital rights management for music—or any other digital artifact indexed to it on a blockchain. But unlike cryptocurrency coins, NFTs are a non-fungible token standard, since they are based on a “unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable” (Din 2021, para. 1). Where one Bitcoin has the same value as the next and is indistinguishable from any other Bitcoin, an NFT is identifiable as unique. Bitcoin, the SOL (Solana) and ETH (Ethereum) tokens, and dozens of other cryptocurrencies are designed to be “fungible,” or divisible and interchangeably tradeable, like traditional monetary currencies. A token launched on Ethereum or Solana, however, can be both a fungible token and an NFT, depending on how its rules have been set by its designer using dApps and smart contracts.

Recently, artists themselves have experimented with cryptocurrencies by issuing their own tokens. Musicians like the Kings of Leon, Deadmau5, Grimes, 3Lau, Jacques Greene, and Tory Lanez have begun publishing NFTs as well (Skinner 2021; Willings 2021). 3Lau’s sale of 33 NFTs earned $11.3 million (Willings 2021; note that all dollar figures listed in this article are in US dollars). The financial sector has further built atop these cybernetic commodities (Mosco 2009), with exchange traded funds—equities—composed of music NFTs (Peoples 2023). The recommodification of the music industry through such derivatives is premised on the permanence and prevalence of markets for cryptocurrencies.

Pundits have glimpsed Magaudda’s first technological promise in music NFTs, namely that “alongside use cases for financial bonds, insurance policies, and artwork, NFTs are the key to blockchain music royalty tracking” (Ivanontech 2021). They provide unique, publicly verifiable “proofs of ownership” separate from copyright as well as the ability to license to the buyer different levels of access (e.g., personal, commercial, or noncommercial uses). Currently, the proof of ownership in NFTs is separate from the copyright system, because the proof is manifested in the computer code itself. As a result, confusion about copyright’s relation to NFTs mounted as NFTs flooded art markets in 2021 (Guadamuz 2021).

The reality of NFT ownership is much more complicated than one might imagine. As a new class of crypto asset, NFTs appear to exist almost unbound by current legal and regulatory systems for IP and finance. But when combined with art, there are overlaps to consider. As it stands today, the NFT purchaser typically owns nothing more than a unique hash on the blockchain with a transactional record and a hyperlink to the file of the artwork; it is the file that obtains copyright (Jordan 2021). Nonetheless, IBM is attaching NFTs to its new patents; this experiment raises the possibility of copyright licenses being handled in a similar way to NFTs (Rosenbaum 2021). With their assets tracked on the blockchain, NFT owners can control, transfer, and issue ongoing royalties or other payment streams to the NFT’s creator or third parties using rules in smart contracts (Kong 2021).

As was the case for the geeky P2P promoters and free culture technologists of the Napster era, DeFi developers and enthusiasts began as outsiders to industry and finance. As a result, the technology carries cultural cachet and subcultural cool among those young adult music fans with technical skills and resources. Whereas early P2P platform developers arose principally from North American and Northern European countries, DeFi music developers have also tended to arise from major cities in the Global South, particularly in India and Brazil. However, DeFi music’s early experiments with NFTs also attracted financing from established music industry producers and were promoted with splashy celebrity endorsements. In 2021, music distributor UnitedMasters began offering cryptocurrency payments to musicians who used their service (Shaw 2021). A joint venture by Jay-Z and Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter and current owner and CEO of Block, may precipitate a DeFi transformation at Tidal, the music service owned by Jay-Z (Singleton 2021). These developments may signal a pivot from DRM to smart contracts by portions of the streaming music industry interconnected with music labels.

The long-standing vision of individuals “earning” from their creative work as fans resonates with Magaudda’s fourth DeFi promise (“access to alternative sources of money for artists and creators”) and with his second DeFi promise as well, since “a perfect music database” and “certified transparent catalogue of all music production and ownership” enables fans to take over potentially remunerative marketing labor in exchange for cryptocurrency micropayments. Smart contracts can substitute fan labor for that of digital intermediaries such as promoters and marketers, who would ordinarily be paid for stimulating traffic and buzz. It is easy to imagine fans working in referral plans, multilevel marketing, and similar schemes, which would take place through programmable features of smart contracts derived from the “perfect music database.”

This “play to earn” model of promotions probably originated in gambling and video game markets, arriving for commercial music slightly later. DeFi music hybridizes and gamifies fan labor to produce tokens and other objects of fan affection, for collecting and trading. The rules of the game (i.e., game design) in this kind of fan labor are expressed in its economic principles (tokenomics), which are conferred through platform governance and enabled through smart contracts running on blockchain applications. Mosco (2009) refers to such accumulations of value as “virtual commodities,” and these can include NFTs like badges and gifted $AUDIO tokens on Audius. Such virtual commodities form the basis of the stream-to-own model used on the Resonate music platform, where fans pay for each play until a price cap is reached, after which they “own” the song and may play it for free. So far, examples of virtual commodities acquired by fan labor such as this are distinct from other use cases for NFTs, such as schemes in which creators sell a fraction of their IP royalties or copyright to fans (who are now considered to be “investors”) or the situation in which fractions of IP in music are sold by music rights start-ups, like Royal and Opulous (Ben Morgan, pers. comm.).

To track the real-time conditions of access and the remuneration of these virtual commodities, NFTs use smart contracts with functionally embedded rights transfers, record payments in publicly visible ledgers, and automatically execute them on conditions designated by the platform or service. The passing and receiving of coins or tokens triggers access controls, events which publicly and permanently alter the record of a chain of custody for a piece of digital music. Smart contracts are therefore the technical fulfillment of the DeFi promise to render links between the fan and the artist/copyright owner more “transparent,” when mediated through a “perfect music database” of IP ownership information (Magaudda 2019).

Today, platforms supporting Ethereum, Solana, or Bitcoin cash (a cryptocurrency derived from Bitcoin) can run smart contracts with or without support for NFTs. Ethereum won early favor among DeFi music developers. It is an open-source software system that “provides a blockchain on which most NFTs are currently hosted” and offers integrated payments and handling of digital contracts (Kong 2021, under “What Is an NFT?”). Further, Ethereum has a “fully functional programming language and has been described as a decentralized world computer” (Kong 2021). However, there are challenges to its dominance. DeFi streamer Audius initially used Ethereum but later “bridged” from Ethereum to Solana, revealing new infrastructure requirements for smart music contracts. The change was precipitated when network data loads for processing transactions was too high for Ethereum to handle (Illu 2022). With this infrastructure change, Audius began adding very DRM-like functionality. For example, Audius used Solana for data-intensive ledger functions, writing content and metadata in a single ledger to record content access and revenue splits. Also part of its ledger are data describing content ownership, a registry of nodes (computers) on the Audius network, the social graph (relationship map) of Audius users, and instructions for enforcing the current token and governance systems. Audius’s “discovery” nodes index metadata for queries, while its artist-elected “content” nodes distribute keys for accessing encrypted content through payment by tokens. Conditional access is controlled at two levels—by community rules implemented through smart contracts and also by functions at the artist-node level. Discovery nodes can monitor when users follow an artist, stream their work multiple times, and repost their music and, as a result, can set conditional permissions to unlock content. The result is that the “bridged” Audius on Solana performs like a DRMed streaming service but uses smart contracts instead of DRM. Prototypes for this model have been only lightly tested in the market.

Post-Piracy Remunerative Streaming and the Payment of Royalties

DeFi piracy may exist when pirated copies of recordings find new footholds in countless new blockchains. Registering pirated copies of others’ work as a master in a blockchain ledger is a simple reinvention of the original piracy problem. So, piracy’s “elimination” as a technology practice, as set out in Magaudda’s list of DeFi promises, is elusive. Although a DeFi environment with NFTs can perform the same access control functions as DRM, the ageless problem of music piracy persists, even for NFT owners. In 2021, Roc-A-Fella Records Inc. sued its co-founder, Damon Dash, for allegedly trying to sell a non-fungible token containing ownership rights to Jay-Z’s 1996 debut studio album, Reasonable Doubt. According to an article in Billboard, Roc-A-Fella claimed that “Dash doesn’t own said rights [to the album] and [Roc-A-Fella] is seeking a court ruling to stop him from any further attempts to make the sale” (Aderoju 2021). This example illustrates how the first link in the (block)chain of custody remains vulnerable to fraudulent representations of ownership.

Anti-piracy’s contemporary digital history springs largely from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in the United States, which, as a legal document, expresses a social imaginary that was elicited from the technorati in a Silicon Valley–Hollywood nexus in the years preceding the act’s passage in 1998. It proposed a socio-technical system to track all digital music assets in the US marketplace under a single, ubiquitous, and effective platform (Rayna and Striukova 2009). Active from 1998 to 1999, the Secure Digital Music Initiative presented a vision of that system to corporate stakeholders (SDMI 1999). SDMI was an early experiment in “Universal DRM” and tried to unify a heterogenous set of recordings, playback devices, and standards into a single system. The experiment failed. Ultimately, SDMI was unsuccessful in unifying technologies or rival players in the consumer electronics industry, particularly those not affiliated with record labels, such as Sony, which owned and operated companies in both the catalog and the consumer electronics markets. Activists for “free culture,” pirate politics, and hacktivism regarded SDMI as a dystopian vision of copyright maximalism and technocratic controls over culture (Doctorow 2006; Burkart 2014b). With its “promise” to “extinguish” piracy (Magaudda 2019) under the new paradigm, DeFi is reminiscent of the vision and rhetoric of SDMI. In both its vision and its infrastructure, Audius is exemplary in this regard. It stores content on blockchain, with authority vested in its node operators, thereby ostensibly outsourcing any potential copyright liability, and does not automatically scan user-generated content for potential piracy (Deahl 2019). The design strategies Audius has used to “see no evil and hear no evil” on its network open its users up to the potential of many new infringement claims and shield the company from legal action.

While it is unlikely that the promise of extinguishing digital piracy can be kept, full public visibility of the music value chain’s prices and terms, as well as access to alternative sources of capital for artists, might be fulfilled by the new technology. Spotify, Deezer, Apple, and the other global streamers share DRM-derived delivery statistics with Soundexchange, record labels, and distribution companies, thus allowing for master recording royalties (performance and mechanical royalty payments) to be made to artists or other rights holders. Publishing or composition royalties “can be harder to access, depending on the country where the stream occurred and whether…[such rights are] registered at specific collection societies” (Schoonmaker 2014, para. 3). Other royalties collection and distribution agencies service interactive streaming and non-interactive digital radio, including mechanical rights organizations like the Harry Fox Agency, Music Reports, and the Mechanical Licensing Collective (Schoonmaker 2014). However, international royalties collection poses problems, owing in part to the large number of publisher affiliates for each country. DRM vendors have not exacerbated these problems, but neither have they contributed a technological solution to long-standing difficulties with tracking royalty payments.

Fragmentation of information systems for tracking who owns a recording and who contributed to it may perhaps be the supervening social necessity needed to press blockchain solutions into service, and “it is the collection agencies that are driving this project, not the major labels or publishers” (Gough 2017, 38). As digital intermediaries, the royalties collection agencies and other brokers want to avoid being bypassed (disintermediated) by the streamers. With 10 percent of worldwide artist payments “unattributable” and piling up in so-called black boxes (accounts for unsatisfied rights claims), the dream of a decentralized, comprehensive, and interoperable database still abounds (Gough 2017, 29–33). These failed claims can result from a number of issues: the inability to identify rights holders (despite payments made for the use of their compositions), the long time required for filing domestic and international copyrights (often begun only when a recording is released), disputes over multiple claims for the same rights exceeding 100 percent of ownership, international collaborations with fewer than all creators asserting their rights, inconsistent international legal treatments of performances resulting in payments, and the slow (often manual) processes for reporting usage and providing clear payments under international reciprocal agreements (Gough 2017, 29). After an initial flurry of activities by DeFi organizations, which followed the dream of bypassing royalties collection agencies (including public blockchain keepers Bittunes and Muse Network) and private projects by Ujo Music and Peertracks, the rapid pace of start-up activities and collaborations has, as of this writing (2023), since died down. Cooperation among players in the streaming music market will be hard to achieve, as, according to Gough, “stakeholders in positions of control within the existing music industry structure, such as collective management organisations, may anticipate their own redundancy with the advent of a single comprehensive database, which may make them resistant to its implementation” (2017, 38).

After receiving widespread criticisms for its treatment of artists, Spotify negotiated a $25 million settlement with music publishers for failing to obtain mechanical licenses for “a large number of songs” in its catalog (Perez 2017). The same year, Spotify acquired a blockchain start-up called Mediachain, whose software claimed to address royalty problems by automating royalty sharing and payments. While Mediachain’s DeFi infrastructure cannot deliver missing information for mechanical royalties, it can still provide data fields in ledger entries, where artist information can be linked to future payments. In so doing, it may have created an option for bypassing the collection agencies. At the time of this writing, Spotify has yet to announce any comprehensive plans for DeFi, but it has tentatively incorporated NFT catalogs into its infrastructure and may be hedging its bets in other ways (such as maintaining its DRM and fighting the prospects of paying new settlements). It may also be studying the ways virtual communities of music fans and artists such as Audius are pursuing more arm’s-length relationships to the streaming giants and their technology practices.

A Further Co-optation of Pirate Politics

With friendlier sharing, alternative accounting methods, and new remuneration schemes for artists and fans, DeFi music can potentially address some of the political and cultural problems DRM created when its widespread implementation turned alternative distribution models based on piracy and P2P into targets for criminal piracy prosecutions. In European countries, grandstanding anti-piracy campaigns led by politicians and affiliated prosecutors won valuable support from the US, which provided increased access to its markets (Burkart 2014b). Although most music fans acquiesced to DRMed releases, politically, the DRM requirements of the Celestial Jukebox spawned various forms of “pirate politics,” which were organized in opposition to the monopolistic tendencies of powerful media companies and which were amplified by DRM (Burkart 2014a). Initially, the work of pirate politics centered on anti-DRM campaigns and sought to increase access to music, while later activists opposed CRM (personalization) and organized around demands for increased data privacy. Hacker-led efforts to bypass and remove DRM during the period of pirate politics were also perceived by some music fans to be meaningful political activity. DRM-free streaming, then, revives a variety of utopian aspirations, for fans and developers alike.

Security concerns about DRM may pressure music industry players to rethink technical access controls and potentially embrace token-based systems. DRM is—ironically—a system vulnerability, as Microsoft discovered in 2005 when its Windows Media DRM proved vulnerable to malware (Ilett 2005). Despite its function as one of the “trusted systems” promoted by media and software companies, DRM is as vulnerable to hacking and user data spillages as are other databases. DeFi’s centerless networking architecture provides greater control to users at the edge of networks and theoretically promotes network robustness and resilience. Its avoidance of privately managed, trusted systems like DRM from Microsoft or Apple may promote network security. These considerations are increasingly relevant to media conglomerates wary of being “pwned” (defeated or owned) by hackers targeting vulnerabilities (Burkart and McCourt 2019) and may, in the near future, motivate incumbent industry players to take down DRM-dependent systems. However, blockchain systems experience security failures on their own and in their integrations with token exchanges.

As it subsumes DRM, DeFi music may re-encode DRM in unexpected ways, with benefits accruing to the incumbent music industry. The openness of DeFi music—in its standards, its participation, and its markets—may resolve some of DRM’s competing standards and the fragmentation of online markets that it produces. If Ethereum- or Solana-based platforms develop to inherit the architectures and infrastructure for handling intellectual property rights indexed by the recording catalogs of the majors, then DeFi will have absorbed the cybernetic power of legacy DRM while also delivering on Magaudda’s DeFi music promise of “access to alternative sources of money for artists and creatives” (2019, 60). If music fans can be convinced that they can once again “own” music and share it, too, through the use of a coin or another scheme, then the loyalty of the paying fans can be harnessed and commodified, and not squandered or repulsed. Active audiences and fans can be captivated by the prospect of empowerment through artists’ use of smart contracts and coins currently supported by Ethereum and Solana and may prove to be willing players in a reconfigured DRM schema with tokens and smart contracts standing in for digital certificates and user surveillance for piracy. As musician and sound engineer Simeon Soden (2021, 2) has observed,

the technology shows most potential in direct-to-fan selling and in ticketing of music performance live streams, with most benefit for [the] DIY musician and small organizations. The opensource nature of the technology further decentralises “direct-to-fan” practices allowing practitioners and organisations to develop their own webstores and facilitates novel live-performance paradigms, affording new monetisation strategies that suit the nature of streamed live music.

Such are the prospects: while the potentials look radical from an industry standpoint, they are not so radical as to be insuppressible, nor are expectations about them untamable. As was the case for the first iteration of the Celestial Jukebox, the major record labels have an incentive to hedge their bets by simultaneously supporting the legacy DRM used by streamers while also committing the capital necessary to influence, if not control, new standards for doing business the new way, with tokens, public ledgers, and friendlier sharing all serving their financial interest. For their part, the global legacy streamers are still indebted to the major labels for ongoing catalog access, on terms that require DRM.

The factors suppressing the radical potentials for DeFi to disrupt the global music industries are still numerous and actively in force. But so far, streaming DeFi music implementations are still small-scale affairs, and dead players already litter the incipient market. Moreover, many unresolved questions linger globally about regulatory support for the cryptocurrencies that underpin DeFi music and the rest of the crypto universe (Ojih et al. 2023; Feinstein and Werbach 2021, 11–12). The biggest streamers seem to be treating the management of royalty conflicts with artists as a first priority, before planning or managing a transition to DeFi.

Further suppressing the radical potentials of DeFi music is the prospect of creating new technical dependencies and literacies for necessary services like cryptocurrency wallets. For many users, cryptocurrencies and tokens are unfamiliar technologies and an understanding of them is still sinking in. Crypto wallets and their associated services are required at every link in the chain connecting artists and fans, and these prerequisites for DeFi music remain the provenance of the technorati, with younger fans still in training. With this review of DeFi infrastructure in place, the next section provides a snapshot of the activities of the early movers in DeFi music streaming and evaluates their prospects against the institutional brakes (factors of suppression) and accelerators (supervening social necessities) for the emergent media sector.

DeFi Music Streaming Services Today

As early as it is in the DeFi era, it is possible to offer a snapshot of the tumultuous markets for music coins, tokens, and platforms. Caught between the radical potentials of the technology and their suppression by entrenched interests, at least thirty-eight start-up companies, independent software projects (including Audius), and some established players (such as the company eMusic) have pursued “decentralized music projects” (Mymusictokens.com 2022), not all of which survived their first year of listing. All of them seemingly share or shared a statement of purpose or marketing plan of delivering on DeFi’s promises to create more transparent and equitable relationships among streaming services, musicians, and the record labels that contribute songs to online catalogs. A few of them have also designed tokenomics schemes to remunerate customer-fans and influencers. In May of 2022, the market capitalization of the 13 extant music tokens was $164 million (Mymusictokens.com 2022); by December of 2023, there were 33 tokens with a capitalization of $364 million (CoinMarketCap, n.d.).

Co-founded in 2016 by Denis Nazarov and Jesse Walden, Brooklyn-based Mediachain was the first DeFi music start-up with close proximity to a global streamer and was acquired by Spotify in 2017. It developed an Ethereum-based, “decentralized, P2P database to connect applications with media and the information about it, as well as an attribution engine for creators, and a cryptocurrency that rewards creators for their work” (Perez 2017). At the time of this writing, Spotify has not announced a token-based distribution system.

Choon, founded in 2018 by Gareth Emery, John Watkinson, Bjorn Niclas, and Matt Hall, introduced Notes, a token based on Ethereum smart contracts. Notes supported licenses that could be associated with each song in a catalog. Choon promoted the notion that its users could participate in the platform as token miners, creating new tokens for circulation through their active involvement as streamers, or by liking songs, participating in new music drops or live shows, adding to a playlist, and so on. Choon also pre-mined and sold a set store of Notes tokens during its product launch. In its revenue sharing schema, Choon released 80 percent of its Notes tokens to artists and retained 20 percent for service fees. Artists on Choon discovered firsthand one of the problems in using a cryptocurrency as a method of payment—namely, that crypto valuations are volatile. A token’s value fluctuates more than conventional currency, such as US dollars or British pounds. Writing for the website Trancefarm, music journalist Becky Roberts (2019) observed, “Artists are finding their Notes [tokens] becoming hugely devalued, and this uncertainty also caused backers to naturally pull any/all funding.” After two long periods of decline in the value of cryptocurrencies, the prices for tokens remain volatile in floating exchanges. Once Choon ceased to operate in 2019, another venture, called Emanate, stepped into the breach. Sean Gardner, Jimi Frew, and Trent Shaw, who founded the Sydney, Australia–based crypto company in 2017, offered artists a new cryptographic token to exchange for Notes tokens: the EMT. This cycle of new platforms and new tokens stands to repeat as long as artists and fans are willing to participate in future speculative exchanges.

In 2018, Andre Ledoux and Vikas Dhanraj founded Voise in Ottawa, Canada. Its Voisium tokens allowed independent artists to sell their music for a 100 percent commission, when accessed through a decentralized P2P network (Kryptographe 2020). Bitsong, headquartered in Malta since 2017, promises to simplify “the bureaucracy to offer artists a meritocratic, transparent, fast and intermediary-free earnings model while users gain a new way to listen to music and earn” (Bitsong, n.d.). The project uses several different blockchain technologies, such as NFTs and fungible Fan Tokens. This mix of technologies tries to please several participants at once: the fan users, the artists, and the record labels, hoping to grow a whole participatory platform. South Korea’s Musicoin, started in 2016, has built a P2P, Ethereum-based platform with tokens and smart contracts for artists and fans (Kryptographe 2020). The platform is free for listeners, has no advertisements, and promises to reward musicians with something that Musicoin calls a “Universal Basic Income” (Musicoin, n.d., para. 3), which is ostensibly provided in Musicoin’s cryptocurrency (called MUSIC).

The online gaming industry, which incorporates and distributes musical recordings, has years of experience developing prototypes for token-based media platforms. For example, between 2018 and 2021, Vietnamese developer Sky Mavis processed over $1 billion in NFT transactions through its Axie Infinity online video game (Hollerith 2021). Journalist Leo Schwartz (2023) reports that despite this success, “The studio’s fortunes came crashing down in 2022. A $620 million hack of its proprietary Ethereum-linked sidechain Ronin, along with the general chill of falling crypto markets, decimated Axie’s player base.”¹⁰ Like Axie Infinity, the examples of music streamers reviewed in this section illustrate the flux of prototyping, pre-positioning, the hedging of bets, and vaporware marketing arising in the early adoption of blockchain in the culture industries. Crypto’s perseverance in this context of escalating risk and technological, financial, and political turmoil is a testament to its ongoing, radical potential for catalyzing change in the media industries.

The social and political factors at stake in the development of DeFi music offer prospects for upending the imbalances of power between music labels/publishers, artists, digital intermediaries, and consumers. These prospects reprise many of the struggles that occurred in the late 1990s and early 2000s among incumbent record labels, upstart P2P challengers, and other media players to resist wholesale changes while hybridizing their existing business models with emergent ones. If the “Spotification” of popular music was the outcome of these early transformations in the media industries (Burkart and Leijonhofvud 2019), what awaits them after the accommodations for DeFi?

DeFi Music and Its “Radical” Potentials

Like other innovations in the past, the new blockchain technologies offer a variety of potentials for musicians, fans, and the media industries. But as Winston ([1998] 2002) has argued, the history of communication technologies shows that radical potentials are routinely suppressed to protect established forms of social order, incorporating innovation into the status quo rather than permitting any radical disruptions of it.¹¹ Throughout this essay, I have suggested that just these kinds of suppressions are already beginning to emerge. Further, I would argue that the “five promises” of DeFi music are not, in fact, radical after all and are, perhaps, both acceptable and amenable to status quo institutions, from music publishing to distribution, as long as they preserve the advantages of incumbent industry players and can promote long-term profitability.

Particularly in their copyright maximalism (i.e., their overall design to maximize revenues from music IP), the five promises can also be seen as a readout of the worst commercial shortcomings of the incumbent music industry, which, as they persist, depress music royalties rates, overpay digital intermediaries, and continually fight piracy and “leaky” DRM. Even in the second and third of the promises (of direct royalties payments and access to alternative sources of capital), the DeFi vision for a new distribution system for streaming music is a privatized one, self-limited by lack of a collective or communal point of reference or principle. A truly radical version of DeFi music would support infrastructure for the functions of the counterfactual and utopian “Alternative Jukebox” (Burkart 2014b), a notional concatenation of decentralized platforms, co-created by users from a variety of independent music communities. The proposal for an Alternative Jukebox notion is not an explicit plan or specification for a commercial service or platform but is instead a decommodification norm, one set against accommodations for DRM. This Alternative Jukebox would be organized in opposition to the business and technology models inherited from the Big Three record companies and their centralizing and individuating socio-technical systems. The Alternative Jukebox would serve radical ends by bypassing the inherited music system in ways that are reminiscent of Napster’s diffusion during the era in which P2P network architectures substituted for conventional modes of discovering, purchasing, and exchanging recorded music. It would provide a platform for interconnected clearinghouses to distribute music directly to fans. It would work independently of the centralized, commercial music streamers, providing the public goods of cultural access, community, cybersecurity, and personal privacy, while promoting conditions for artistic equity.

Historically, the inertia and longevity of DRM infrastructure resists a secular trend toward music industry decentralization (Wikström 2013, 1–6).¹² Since DeFi music supports access controls in its basic architecture (e.g., via smart contracts), this article has asked whether DRM for music streamers stands the chance of being replaced or bypassed by one or more implementations of a DeFi scheme, and answered, provisionally, that despite the hype and boosterism of a thousand technology analysts, the supervening social necessity that will shape DeFi schemes has not been considered. The pressures of fan culture for a change are not by themselves enough to deliver the solution, especially since the streamers have been the key source of the music industry’s recovery from a long recessionary period. Moreover, we can imagine how a number of DeFi’s radical potentials will be actively suppressed, as industry incumbents begin to subvert its independent operation and as the crypto sector endures repeated crises. The incumbents’ rights databases are centralized, siloed, non-interoperable, full of “black boxes,” and vulnerable to security breaches (Gough 2017), and decentralized alternatives to them have not yet emerged. Other factors that may conspire against a rapid and total changeover to DeFi music are regulatory changes for cryptocurrencies, ownership concentration within and among music firms and their digital intermediaries, undercapitalization, and the maintenance of CRM-based surveillance. The media economics and tokenomics of smart contracts are still provisional and undergoing continual proofs of concept and prototyping, and all of this is occurring during a period in which widespread technological literacy around crypto usage is lacking. Anarchy on the blockchain is not unthinkable, with cases of piracy, hacking, and fraudulent blockchain transactions climbing and active vulnerabilities increasing as systems scale up over time. DeFi music “scenes” shared by hackers, technorati, and musicians—which would support the new paradigm and give it critical mass—are still, as yet, nascent. All of these factors contribute to a suppression of the radical potentials of blockchain-based streaming music distribution, with few countervailing forces on the accelerator. For DRM as an organizing social technology for media and communications, these encumbrances slow any broader diffusion of DeFi music.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the help of Jon Allan, David Arditi, Susanna Leijonhufvud, Ben Morgan, Alessandro Arbo, and Ric Shreves in providing ideas and examples for this article.

NOTES

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