For musicians, the benefits of the streaming economy haven’t been equally distributed. The population of artists, producers, and engineers that make up the bulk of music’s middle class saw their earnings stall over the last two decades before completely breaking down during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s clear that a new paradigm is necessary, and it’s a requirement that Chris Moraites has used as a guiding philosophy.
Moraites is the founder and CEO of SIKI, a new kind of streaming platform built on Hedera Hashgraph that lets artists mint their music as NFTs and benefit directly from their community of fans and devotees. Artists that use the groundbreaking platform are paid higher royalties than other streaming platforms right off the bat, and also benefit from further use of their music through crypto-native “smart contracts” that act like automatic royalty and licensing systems. Fans benefit as well as they’re able to collect artist-minted NFTs that can see their value grow alongside the music’s notoriety.
Billboard talked to Moraites…
