What if someone started a real underground music label on the dark web. Bitcoin only, no banks, no streaming and no middlemen. Artists could drop music, earn for say 5 or 10 years, then the rights go to the public domain. No corporate ownership, no lifetime contracts.

Could a label like that actually work?

  • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
    2·
    12 hours ago

    A feeling that seems to underly this question is that record companies are some capitalist evil nightmare and that crypto is the saviour here. I don’t think any of the comments here address that part so I thought I might try.

    I’m guessing most of this post is thinking of small musicians but to think about how much money a record label makes I’m going to be lazy and use a number I saw recently - Taylor Swift grossed 2 billion from ticket sales for her Eras Tour and got about 190 million after tax and payments for services:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2024/12/09/taylor-swifts-eras-tour-grossed-2-billion-double-any-other-tour-in-history-report-says/

    That’s a similar sort of order to the fines we’re seeing for laundering in crypto - Binance pleaded guilty to money laundering and paid 4 billion in resolutions:

    https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/binance-and-ceo-plead-guilty-federal-charges-4b-resolution

    And similar to the gains Trump has made since shortly before coming into office, an estimated 1 billion from crypto:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2025/06/05/this-is-how-much-trump-has-made-from-crypto-so-far/

    It seems like a lot of those payments that Trump made money from are some form of corruption. And a large portion of the amount that record labels make.

    It’s reasonable to look at the wealth of record companies and to wish it was more reasonable to distributed. It’s also reasonable to look at how little artists make of certain transactions and think there must be something amiss. I honestly have no idea on the accuracy of those two, the world is counterintuitive sometimes but I’m sure there is a lot of room for improvement.

    Aiming to use crypto as one of the mechanisms for improvement seems pretty far fetched to me from a pragmatic perspective. (But I think both the anti record company sentiment and the pro crypto sentiment have similar ideologies.) From what I’ve seen crypto has only demonstrated usefulness as a mechanism for:

    • investing in a bubble/bust market (that helps make some people very rich)
    • funnelling scam payments (that helps make some people rich)
    • funnelling payments for favours / corruption (that helps make some people rich)
    • porcoesphino@mander.xyz
      1·
      12 hours ago

      Sorry, I know this is definitely a tangent from the OP but I was closing tabs and Trump’s comment on pardoning Changpeng Zhao is too good not to share:

      Which one? Who is that?.. The recent one? Yes, the? I believe we’re talking about the same person because I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know, he was recommended by a lot of people. A lot of people say that—are you talking about the crypto person?—A lot of people say that he wasn’t guilty of anything. He served four months in jail, and they say that he was not guilty of anything, that what he did, well, you don’t know much about crypto. You know nothing about, you know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news. But let me just tell you that he was somebody that, as I was told, I don’t know him, I don’t believe I’ve ever met him. But I’ve been told a lot of support. He had a lot of support, and they said that what he did is not even a crime. It wasn’t a crime, that he was persecuted by the Biden administration, uh, and so, I gave him a pardon at the request of a lot of very good people.