If you've seen headlines about putting the music industry on the blockchain and were wondering what's up with that ...

Musicians get paid last, and have been forever. Also, musicians are really good at music and actually worse than any normal human at business. With radio largely replaced by streaming, this hasn't changed. So Bloomberg has put up a breathless piece of hype, ignorant of both the music industry and the bitcoin industry, suggesting that doing it all on THE BLOCKCHAIN will shower money on all.

Here's the download link for the original report.

Plus points: it is indeed from Berklee. Minus points: it's made of squirrels and crack.

They talk about Bitcoin to introduce the concept of a cryptocurrency-based blockchain. The actual proposal is of some magical blockchain with sub-second transaction confirmations and no costs (or none that can't be externalised) that will fully implement the music industry's most maximalist micropayment dreams:

A database of accurate rights ownership information, like the one we have proposed, could form the foundation of a similar cryptocurrency log. In addition to rights ownership information, the royalty split for each work, as determined by a mixture of statute and contracts, could be added to the database. Each time a payment is generated for a given work, the money would be automatically split according to the set terms, and each party’s account would instantly reflect the additional revenue. For example, suppose a song is purchased from a digital music store, such as iTunes. After the store takes its cut, for ease of demonstration, we will hypothetically assume the revenue generated by the purchase comes to US$1.00. This money would be split between the two different works contained in the song, with a 9.1 cent mechanical royalty going to the musical work, and the remaining 90.9 cents going to the sound recording. Next, if the contract between the publisher and songwriter specifies a 75/25 split of revenue from downloads, the publisher would receive 6.825 cents and the songwriter would receive 2.275 cents. With an identical split at the record label, The label would receive 68.175 cents, and the recording artist would get 22.725 cents. The blockchain network could also further divide this 22.725 cents between the members of a band, if applicable.

This entire process would take place in less than one second, allowing all parties to access their money immediately after it is generated. Further, this payment system is fully trackable and would ensure that royalties are not held by third parties, such as labels and publishers, before being passed to the artist and songwriter. This would eliminate concerns about accidental or intentional underpayment of royalties.

The carrot here is to musicians: "hey, you might finally get paid without the leeches sucking out every penny first!" It's just unfortunate it relies on things that just aren't feasible.

Apart from the technical implausibility, there's literally no benefit in this for the record labels themselves: their business model is uncheckable rapacity.

tl;dr the music industry has no fucking understanding of technology, and musicians the least of all. This is more snakeoil. At least it's less detached from reality than DRM.