How Blockchain Technologies Will Empower Artists

Blockchain and artists may sound like strange bedfellows at first.

From Mary Shelley's meditation on the power and threat of advancing biological science in Frankenstein to Jay-Z's lossless audio music distribution service Tidal, artists have turned to technology for both inspiration and a platform to share their work, and the tech world has turned to artists and the culture at large to understand how technology can ethically evolve to meet human needs.

CryptoHQ, a groundbreaking event hosted in Davos concurrently with the World Economic Forum earlier this year, acknowledged the essential connection between technological advancements and artists by including Swarovski artist San B, UB40 band member Brian Travers, and co-founding bass guitarist of Dire Straits John Illsely in their roster of blockchain leaders.

Will blockchain hurt artists or help them? Dispatch Labs argues that blockchain will empower artists.

The blockchain world is currently tackling a scalability crisis, as developers struggle to find protocols to handle the increasing popularity of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other blockchain platforms.

Anyone interested in creating a music distribution platform that uses blockchain to manage transactions should be invested in this scalability challenge, too.

Dispatch uses secure blockchain transactions to manage off-chain artifacts such as datasets or music files.

Smart contracts confer access rights and ownership as transactions proceed on secure blockchain ledgers, but these transactions can be handled far quicker than traditional Bitcoin and older generation blockchain transactions because the actual artifact being rented, exchanged, or sold is stored off-chain.

Utopi is using a Go-To-Live Protocol dApp built on top of Dispatch's blockchain ecosystem.

Blockchain has the potential to replace cable television and streaming networks like Netflix with a higher-quality viewer experience, and Dispatch's partnership with Utopi shows the shape a new blockchain streaming video ecosystem could take.