I'm going to travel on a hypothetical journey which will include exploring the world of altcoins and NFTs. If this offends you look away 😂 Graphic artists have NFTs on altchains to enable them to monetise digital art. It doesn't lock it behind a paywall, but it does allow supporters to pay for unique digital copies. I know this went crazy with the whole bored ape thing, but the principle is valid. It would technically be possible to create an audio encoding system that embedded a wallet address which, through a smart contract, would force the transfer of funds in order to execute (play) the contract (music track). Thus, you could place audio tracks behind a decentralised, artist owned, paywall. That contract could be modified by the artist so that they can change the monetary exchange depending on demand, fame etc... So an artist just starting out may wish to allow free play of their tracks, whereas Taylor Swift may up the cost to play a song to $1 (for example). Historically, despite the bad wrap and the potential for abuse, recording labels and managers have been highly incentivised financial guardians of their artists ensuring not only the artist earned money from their work, but the studio and manager earned its share too. Placing that monetary management onto artists in the V4V space may be too much of an ask, encoding it into the music tracks itself may be a way to abstract the artist from the financial management they are now burdened with.

That last bit 🤢

That'll be just like the prediction that the movie 'demolition man' made. Re: songwriting is just advertising jingles.

yeah, I think most people believe these platforms are 'free' to use when they're really paying with their data and attention. It has really screwed things up. It's hard to go back to charging for something that people expect to be 'free'

Now that I think about it, rappers have been plugging products for years, shamelessly