Understanding Blockchain Technology and the Music Industry

First off, if you don’t know what blockchain technology is, welcome to the club. 

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions about the technology and concepts that can be difficult to grasp. In short, Blockchain is a distributed and immutable (unchanging over time or unable to be changed) ledger, allowing you to track almost anything, tangible or intangible goods.  Blockchain has been primarily used to track bitcoin/cryptocurrency transactions.


Blockchain promotes decentralized data by becoming a system of keeping records by everyone without any need for a central authority.  This allows for ledger keeping that is almost impossible to falsify.  How does Blockchain get its name? Imagine maintaining a shared ledger with many pages of records. Each page begins with a summary of the page before it (if you change part of the previous page, you will also have to change the summary on the current page).  The pages are actually linked or “chained” together.  In technological terms, pagers are called blocks, and since each block is linked to the data on the previous block, we have a chain of blocks or “Blockchain”.


For more detailed information on Blockchain and how the technology works and also how it could impact our future, You can learn more from these videos and links:

Blockchain Technology for Dummies

Blockchain Explained

19 Industries the Blockchain will Disrupt:

The links below provide how Blockchain could affect the music industry.

From music2020.org

The video explains how Blockchain can create a free-market ecosystem faster and more efficiently.

From NEST HQ, Blockchain and the music industry

This documentary was designed to make technical concepts about blockchain easy to understand and accessible for those just getting into space without sacrificing the necessary technical terms and language.

From Builtin.com:  a Review of 17 Blockchain Music Companies

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