MusicLife has closed a $5 million Series A round led by Metropolis VC. The startup will use the funds for its ambitious plan to expand “the world’s first music exchange” based on blockchain technology. At a time when the bottom is falling out of physical and download sales, MusicLife incentivizes the purchase of music.
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MusicLife is a new blockchain music exchange ecosystem that allows fans to own “stock” in songs and purchase music. Song shareholders earn dividends from their song shares. MusicLife also lets users mine cryptocurrency by listening to songs on musical wearables.
Since launching this June, over 600,000 people have signed up on the MusicLife exchange, which has over 30 million users in its ecosystem.
How MusicLife Works
Artists or labels can license their music to the platform where it will be free to listen to until up to 50,000 plays. Once a song reaches that threshold, an AI-powered mechanism will set a price based off frequency of plays and create a MusicToken.
MusicTokens represent the property rights of songs and are split into multiple shares. Rightolders holders will own 95% of shares and MusicLife will own5%. Fans will have the opportunity to purchase up to 45% existing shares from the rightsholders;
While paying for music, fans can get song shares in the equivalent amount of the song’s listening price, which will remain at a low rate of around one dollar. In addition to paying to listen to songs, users can purchase and exchange shares of songs with MitCoin (MITC) on the music exchange directly. As songs increase in popularity, MusicToken shareholders earn MITC dividends.
Partnering With Echo Music, Others
MusicLife also allows others to embed their music libraries for free via an SDK. Software linked to MusicLife will share in the profits generated by users purchasing music. The first software embedded is the app echo Music which provides innovative music services and has 30 million users worldwide.
“This will be a great music library solution for us, it’s free and will help us to earn profit. MusicLife lets us focus on application services without worrying about copyright issues,” said Junyi Liu, the founder of echo Music.
Get Paid To Listen: MusicLens
MusicLife has also developed a model which lets users mine cryptocurrency by simply listening to song on connected musical hardware. Musical wearables can connect to MusicLife through an SDK which allows the hardware to collect listening data and establishes MusicLife’s song prices. In exchange for their listening data, users who opt in will earn MITC directly, effectively mining cryptocurrency by listening to music. The audio glasses, MusicLens™ will be the first piece of hardware to connect to MusicLife’s ecosystem.
MusicLens use bone-conduction technology to play music without headphones. MusicLens glasses also have sensors which can verify that a human is listening to a song, allowing MusicLife to accurately set song prices in their ecosystem. It will be in mass production in late 2018.