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Rachel Wolfson
Reporter
Rachel Wolfson
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The music industry, a multi-billion-dollar market, has seen rapid growth in digital streaming on platforms like Spotify.
However, streaming platforms often overlook musicians’ interests, according to recent reports, leaving artists to receive minimal compensation in return for their music.
Recent statistics show that musicians earn only pennies per stream on platforms like Apple Music and Spotify.
A Musician Challenged by the Traditional Music Industry
Italian singer-songwriter and actress Violetta Zironi has experienced the struggles of streaming platforms firsthand.
Zironi shared with Cryptonews that music today suffers from hyperinflation due to platforms like Spotify.
“These platforms have commoditized and devalued music to virtually nothing, creating monopolies that control artists,” she said.
The challenges with streaming platforms led Zironi to reconsider her music career altogether.
“I was at a crossroads in my career after eight years in the traditional music industry and was considering stepping away from music,” Zironi said. “During the pandemic, traditional streaming platforms weren’t serving my artistic or community-building goals, and live performances were impossible.”
Encouraged by her mother, Zironi began exploring non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as an alternative to traditional streaming.
NFTs have become popular among musicians for allowing them to earn more in royalties while gaining control over their data and musical rights.
“When my mother mentioned NFTs and peer-to-peer art collections, something clicked,” Zironi shared. “I left traditional channels behind to explore this space exclusively, and I haven’t looked back.”
Bitcoin Ordinals and New Opportunities for Musicians
For nearly three years, Zironi has been releasing her music on the blockchain, with the rise of Bitcoin music inscriptions through Ordinals providing even more possibilities.
“This ensures my work is preserved forever on the most robust, decentralized ledger, tied to Bitcoin’s permanence,” Zironi mentioned.
Bitcoin’s blockchain has not only preserved Zironi’s music but has also opened new revenue streams.
Recently, Zironi auctioned her latest song, “n0 0rdinary kind,” for 1 Bitcoin (BTC), marking the 34th largest inscription on Bitcoin.
With the maturation of Bitcoin Ordinals, more musicians are inscribing their music on Bitcoin’s blockchain.
Former music producer Jim Crane noted that blockchain technology is becoming increasingly popular for enabling artists to reclaim control over their creative output and revenue streams.
“Blockchain offers transparent tracking of how music is used and monetized, which helps in building trust between artists and consumers,” Crane said.
Inscribing Music On-Chain
According to Crane, Bitcoin music inscriptions offer significant benefits, including immutable attribution and ownership.
“The blockchain provides a permanent and tamper-proof record of who created, collaborated or contributed, in any way, to a piece of music, ensuring that artists receive proper credit and can prove ownership unequivocally,” he explained.
In 2023, Crane developed a protocol called “Audionals” to streamline music inscription on Bitcoin and minimize intermediaries in the industry.
This protocol supports recursive use of inscribed audio on-chain, similar to a digital audio workstation but within a decentralized environment.
“This protocol allows for the recursive use of inscribed audio on-chain, similar to how a traditional digital audio workstation (DAW) operates, but within a decentralized environment,” Crane added.
Solving Block Space Limitations
Despite the advantages of Bitcoin music inscriptions, challenges remain, particularly around limited block space.
Shailee Adinolfi, Business Development Lead for Leather, told Cryptonews that Ordinal inscriptions involve inscribing metadata onto a satoshi (the smallest unit of Bitcoin), with each satoshi capable of holding up to 4MB of data.
“This could cause real demand when multiple artists are looking to launch songs, albums, or collections,” Adinolfi said.
Zironi noted that she encountered block space limitations when attempting to inscribe a full song with visual artwork.
“Block space on Bitcoin is limited to 4MB, and high-quality inscriptions are costly, so I worked within 600KB to make it feasible,” she explained. “However, this limitation became a blessing in disguise: for the first time, I could showcase an authentic, unpolished vocal and guitar performance without industry pressure to overproduce.”
Adinolfi added that recursive inscriptions, introduced after Ordinals, enable developers to pull data from existing files, conserving block space instead of uploading new features with each inscription.
“The solution for musicians may come from Bitcoin scaling to layer-2 (L2) solutions, allowing artists to create on-chain with lower fees,” she said.
Crane further explained how Audionals addresses block space constraints by inscribing small text files with instructions for recreating music on-chain, making the process far more efficient in terms of block space and costs.
“The first Audional Song, ‘Truth,’ uses studio-quality audio samples and represents the audio equivalent of a 70MB WAV recording,” he said. “By creating it recursively and reusing the same samples, we can drastically reduce the information size needed to play the song – without any compression or reprocessing of the audio.”
Crane noted that the Audional version of “Truth” initially required about 100KB with the first sequencer version, but through further optimization, he reduced it to 30KB by serializing the inscribed data.
“Currently, I have further reduced the total size of a 12-minute song file created with the Audional Sequencer to approximately 3KB,” he said. “This has brought the on-chain studio master cost down from thousands of dollars to just a few dollars.”
Bitcoin’s Role in the Future of Digital Music
Although musical inscriptions on Bitcoin remain a new concept, Zironi believes this model will gain traction.
“The demand for a decentralized system that serves musicians and music enthusiasts is immense,” she shared. “Over the past year, I’ve inscribed four other songs on Bitcoin, and people are already asking to collect them.”
Crane envisions that Audionals will contribute to a decentralized music ecosystem, making blockchain music creation more accessible to artists across various backgrounds and skills.
However, he pointed out that the industry must still establish standards to ensure interoperability and broader adoption.
“We still need the standardization of protocols,” he remarked. “This means establishing common standards for music on the blockchain to ensure interoperability and widespread adoption.”
