Musicoin is a decentralized platform built on the blockchain that supports music creation, distribution, and consumption in a shared economy. Thus, it aims to empower musicians to take full ownership of their finances and content. 

The Musicoin platform was developed on a transparent peer-to-peer network powered by programmable smart contracts, which allow fair remuneration for musical content and services. As per the whitepaper, the team at Musicoin works to provide fair distribution, remuneration, and exposure for independent musicians. Musicoin aims to license more than 30 million tracks and host at least one million independent musicians on its platform.

The recording music industry, in recent years, has seen a boom in revenue because of rising digital sales. However, digitization in the music industry brings problems like peer-to-peer file sharing that allows people to pirate content online without legal implications. This created disappointment among musicians as they were not compensated for their work. Ultimately, the music industry was forced to adapt to streaming rather than owning content. Streaming offers a free and legal alternative to access music and drives listeners away from piracy.

The music industry faces one more problem wherein upcoming or lesser-known musicians receive little from the total revenue generated while most of the revenue is consumed by the intermediaries. Musicoin seeks to be the solution as the first platform in the cryptocurrency space that empowers blockchain technology to heal the woes that afflict the music industry. These problems are centralization, lack of transparency, and an unsustainable business model.

Musicoin attempts to abolish the problems plaguing today’s music industry by:

Musicoin blockchain offers a transparent distribution of value across all parties, from miners and project developers to musicians and listeners, by automated P2P payments enforced by smart contracts, without any need for outside intermediaries. Also, Musicoin, instead of using centralized servers, uses a decentralized P2P file distribution system known as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to store and distribute its content. Additionally, all musicians on the Musicoin platform retain full ownership of their content and are rewarded fairly and automatically through autonomous smart contracts. PPP (Pay Per Play), a smart contract on the Musicoin blockchain, enforces licensing terms to reward a certain fixed amount of MUSIC (the native currency of the Musicoin platform) per playback.

Musicoin project was launched on February 11, 2017. Isaac Mao, a software architect, entrepreneur, and learning and social technology researcher, is the founder of Musicoin. Ben Gyles is the lead mobile developer. River Yan is a system engineer with a specialty in Python programming.