Artistry is an open platform to help music fans directly fund the artists that they listen to and care about.
Artistry identifies the music you play on your computer in the background, and puts aside a small donation of your choosing every month to split between the artists you listen to.
Until it is sent to an artist, this set-aside money is under your control. You can see how your money is split (proportional to plays), and remove plays for artists you'd rather not donate to, before it is distributed at the end of the month. If we can't verify an artist will receive your money, you retain control of it (set aside in your Artistry wallet), until we can verify that artist. As soon as we verify this artist, they receive the funds allocated to them.
Initially, artists aren't in the system. We wanted to design a scalable, decentralized way of verifying artist identity. To that end, we are crowd-sourcing reliable contact information for each artist from the fan community through Artistry (asking users to find an appropriate public email address or phone number for each artist). Once enough redundancy from geographically isolated fans results in consensus, that email address will serve as a point of contact to inform the artist that they have money waiting for them in the Artistry system, help them create a wallet, and finally provide us with a key (from that verified address) for forwarding their tips.
Running on your computer is an audio-fingerprinting generator that talks to our distributed content-id system (please help us by hosting a lookup server)! This tracks the songs you play with a unique song id (from musicbrainz). At the end of the month, your money is split to the artists you've listened to, and your songlist and timestamps are uploaded to the blockchain (if you've opted in). Opting in gives you access to other anonymized user data so you can build new recommendation services and experiences with the shared data.
A mock-up is below.
Cool side-effects of this design include:
(1) an open database of anonymous users and their music listening habits (anonymized user id, a song id, and a timestamp of when it was played). We want to build an API on top of this so anyone can design an intelligent recommender system based on real user data. Open data and privacy are two very important concerns.
We will design this system so you can opt-out of having the songs you play stored in a blockchain for this purpose. However, payments to artist bitcoin wallets (while anonymized) are fully traceable, so using a system of this sort will still give auditability into the artists that you are listening (and thus donating) to.
(2) an open database of working, reputable contact information for artists. This is integral to the platform because we need to crowd-source reputable contact information for these artists so they can claim their money (and we naturally verify they use this address by checking that it has been successfully used to claim a wallet).
This could potentially be abused (for spamming artists), but it also could provide interesting opportunities to reach out and connect many artists, and or serve as a reputable address for other services that require artist identity verification.