Is All-Win Possible? A Novel Smart Contracts-based Music Recommendation System

Abstract

The current streaming music ecosystem provides a mature and prevalent platform for artists to publish music products and for listeners to consume music services. However, as the main power of streaming content producers, artists have little to no control over their musical works after assigning their copyrights and management to third parties, especially for long-tail artists. The booming development of blockchain technology in recent years brings a fresh change to the music industry. The clear copyrights recorded on-chain attract more and more artists to stand in line, although blockchain-based music platforms are still in their early stage of development. As the number of users and artists keeps increasing, some platforms continue to use the recommendation design of the current streaming music ecosystem. The shortage in this system could cause a long-tail phenomenon again. In this work, we proposed a novel music recommendation system by considering the value of three parties on the platform. Through designing two scheme-based recommendations by leveraging the flexible agreement design of smart contracts, we proposed an effective music promotion strategy for the blockchain-based music platform. It has been verified that the new model has attained significant improvement in the loyalty enhancement of platform users.