Blockchain Turns On The Fan Mode For Hot K-Pop Tracks

You must be living under a rock if you haven’t yet heard of K-pop. But then if you haven’t heard of it, perhaps you don’t even know what it is.

Basically, it’s short for Korean pop music. And they are very popular in many parts of the world, including India, especially because of bands like BTS, BLACKPINK, Seventeen and Stray Kids.

That explains why several recent K-pop tracks, including Golden and Soda Pop from the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters, which dropped on Netflix in June this year, still continue to be popular among listeners.

Usually, if you are crazy about some tracks, you listen to them on loop. But it seems that’s not good enough for K-pop fans; they yearn for more. In fact, they want a piece of the song.

And guess what? They are likely to get it, thanks to blockchain.

The Korea Times reported last week that Aria Protocol, a Korean blockchain project, has launched a platform to fractionalise and trade music rights through blockchain.

They have put a catalogue of Korean music rights — reportedly amounting to about US$ 100 million — on blockchain. This platform allows a fan to buy a small slice of a song’s rights and get a piece of what the song earns.

Although it’s a small number considering the size of their cultural-content market ($79 billion in 2023), and Aria has acquired rights in only 48 songs so far, it cannot be denied that it’s a path-breaking move.

Why Blockchain?

The concept could come as a surprise to the industry because, traditionally, music rights are part of complex corporate contracts. Even artists aren’t always sure how their own songs earn over time. And the fans? They are not at all part of the money-making plan.

But Korea has chosen to change that — although at a very small level right now — by democratising the music ownership system, for which they are using blockchain technology.

Why blockchain? Because traditional ways of owning an asset wouldn’t work when it comes to dividing a song into hundreds of pieces that can be owned by hundreds of people. It would involve impossibly unmanageable paperwork.

However, with blockchain, it would be easier to maintain ownership records. This is what the process looks like:

First, the song gets tokenised into multiple units, allowing buyers to purchase as many pieces as they desire.

The system then writes ownership details on a digital ledger, which cannot be altered. That means names or ownership can be checked by all authorised parties.

The simplicity of this system is that, though it’s built on a complex technology, a user or a buyer doesn't need to be tech-savvy or deal with any of the code underneath.

And the sweeter part is that soon after making the purchase, a buyer gets to keep a proportional piece of the revenue the song generates.

This is a win-win for young artists as well, where early listeners can support them in a way that is more than cheering.

If a song grows later, the people who believed in it early on grow with it. Artists get to keep more control, and fans feel invested in the song’s journey.

Where India Fits Into This

Indian music is immensely popular. Punjabi beats have fans in several continents, and reels embedded with Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi songs appear in reels in countries that don’t even know the names of the languages.

The reach is huge. But the music rights are with a handful of people or corporations. Most transactions occur behind closed doors, brokered mostly through licensing deals where contracts are tight, and artists themselves do not have much say.

A blockchain-based system could open a new doorway that would turn music into an asset that can be owned fractionally, though it would not work like a mutual fund or ETF unless a regulatory framework is in place.

That way, even an ordinary person could have benefited from the wild success of recent tracks like Saiyaara and Dhun from the movie, Saiyaara.

This series is brought to you in partnership with Algorand.

Author:   Vishwas Ved

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