OPUS and other platforms

OPUS, being a decentralized music platform, can bring new possibilities into the world of music, such as a blockchain-based revenue system, rendering conventional record labels obsolete, and letting artists earn the money they deserve for their hard work.

Over the last decade, we have seen huge growth in the digital music streaming sector, pushing physical album sales out of the market. Nowadays, streaming takes up around 75% of the music industry revenue, bringing favorite hits to everyone around the globe. Furthermore, streaming makes music accessible worldwide and thus lowers piracy rates. It all seems great until we take a closer look at the payment artists receive for their work.

In an interview for Forbes, Mark Mulligan, one of the leading voices in music industry analysis, uses an example of NSYNC’s No String Attached, the top album in 2000 which sold 9 million copies that year. It would take 600 million people each streaming this album in its entirety to generate the same income as a physical product, coming to around 8.5 billion streams. It goes without saying that streaming music brings income with more effort than selling physical products.

Plummeting sales of physical copies and the rise of streaming hit a lot of artists hard as the payment they get from streaming revenue just isn’t enough. But lately a new solution has emerged: with a blockchain-based revenue system and a decentralized music platform, OPUS strives to help artists get a bigger cut of the revenue by connecting them directly to you, without the need for a record label. By using blockchain technology we can store tracks on IPFS (Inter Planetary File System), thereby drastically reducing storage costs, which in turn grants artists more money in a secure and easy way.

Using conventional means, around 52% of revenue goes to record labels, who would then pay their artists anywhere between 15% to 50% of what’s left. It sets revenue for artists at something between 7,8% and 26% of the total revenue. OPUS will only take up to 3% of total revenue as maintenance costs.

By doing some math, we can easily see that the mean revenue artist gets, basing on the eight biggest music streaming platforms, is about $0.00769 per track stream. Keep in mind that this is about 12% of the total revenue, the amount used by most of the traditional music platforms. Using this revenue system an artist needs to get around 163,407 streams in one month to reach the minimum wage. In comparison, OPUS revenue per stream tops that by around 800% coming up to $0.062160 per stream, letting the creator reach the minimum wage threshold with 24,616 streams.

Numbers never lie, and using our platform is currently the best option for an artist to get revenue. Furthermore, artists who use Opus can enjoy bigger creative freedom as they are not bound by any contract with a record label, bringing new tracks in high quality directly to you. Don’t wait, sign up to OPUS today and help us make a better future for the music industry.

-Aleksander Witocha

More articles to come

This here is just the first article in a new series of articles we will be publishing. We would like to inspire constructive and creative discussions about music, the music industry, blockchain, and tech, and so we will regularly be releasing blog entries similar to this one. Stay tuned for more!