Fairness and freedom for artists: Towards a Robot Economy for the Music (Streaming) Industry

[Tim-W]

(Placeholder issue for msc thesis)

Problem statement

(Musicians/artists/creators) receive low compensation for publishing their content. * [Typical cut of revenue:](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/03/how-much-musicians-make-spotify-itunes-youtube) (distributor: Spotify/iTunes/Google Play/...) Signed records: 25% distributor 55% label 20% artist Unsigned records: 40% distributor 60% artist * Smaller artists get low revenue, due to the "pro rata" model applied by e.g. Spotify. A [user-centric](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/should-spotify-change-the-way-it-pays-artists-763986/) model should be more fair (economics/business, less CS) * [The distributor could censor tracks](https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/entertainment/spotify-removes-kelly-music-from-playlists-under-new-hateful-content-policy/9NIgUD8qJBd2tAYmVhn5hK/) * [Platform lock-in](https://www.google.com/search?q=Google+Rules%3A+The+History+and+Future+of+Copyright+Under+the+Influence+of+Google) **Existing and upcoming solutions** Blockchain-based solutions exist for music streaming services. At least two start-ups attempted. * [OPUS Audio](https://opus.audio/) "Helps artist generate the revenue they deserve". It uses [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/) for distributed file storage, but actually uses a back-up off-chain database for performance purposes. Strategy for IPFS nodes: OPUS deploys **its own** nodes around the globe for low latency. OPUS uses Ethereum smart contracts. Using smart contracts, "[consumers] can rest assured almost 100% of the payments are delivered to the artists transparently, immutably and without intermediaries taking large chunks of revenue”. * [Musicoin project](https://musicoin.org/) encourages **independent artists** to register and publish their work on its own blockchain-based platform. Very interesting: consumers have a free service without ads, while artists get paid (in $MUSIC) Uses earn-per-play smart contracts based on preset fees each time a song gets played (for >s seconds). Consumers can also tip artists (micropayments). Uses mining in the form of bitcoin. * [Mycelia project](http://myceliaformusic.org/) is not a streaming service on its own but does provide "creative passport" technology: a digital container with authorization of work, acknowledgements, payment mechanisms and metadata. **Shortcomings of these solutions** * Musicoin pay-per-play system depends entirely on investors and the price of its non-stable currency. If its currency becomes [worthless](https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/musicoin/) then the artists also receive low revenue. * OPUS deploys nodes itself and consumer pay a (small) fee for this infrastructure (different from Tribler/torrents) **The dream: a good decentralized streaming system** * A (torrent) streaming technology as fast as spotify, based on a p2p file sharing system (tribler? IPFS?). Challenge: seeders for content with small popularity. To think about: are bandwidth tokens enough incentive? * Proof of authorship on the blockchain Tribler/tribler#4144 * (Near) 100% of fees from consumers go directly to the artists they listen to. * Payouts with stablecoin (USDT/EURS) * Tipping system/micropayments * Effective sharing and recommendation systems **Completed reading list** * [How the blockchain is disrupting the art economy as we know it (2017)](https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogeraitken/2017/08/17/how-the-blockchain-is-disrupting-the-art-economy-as-we-know-it/#53c12c9f74fe) * de Vos, M., & Pouwelse, J. (2018). A Blockchain-based Micro-Economy of Bandwidth Tokens. CompSys 2018. * [Blockchain is changing how media and entertainment companies compete](https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/blockchain-is-changing-how-media-and-entertainment-companies-compete/) * Zhang, B. (2018). Credit Mining: An Incentive and Boosting System in a Peer-to-Peer File-sharing Network.

[synctext]

• Learnings: running 6 Android emulators on local laptop as ideal development environment. (plus 3 real phones and unit tests)
• Promo video on Youtube.com
• 9 crashes reported inside Kotlin-IPv8 messaging since 5Feb; 7 other crashes
  • create issue(s) with details please (fixing is something else, essential to know pending quality issues)
  • 2 inside Trustchain payload generator
• Video is great intro to your thesis work and publicity for user-trail + measurements of live network.
  • users may be confused where music comes from and what the copyright status is.
  • suggested text to add "Streaming any Bittorrent audio swarm", "Grow the Creative Commons"
• Thesis review, 48 page version.
  • No new content needed anymore!
  • Make everything cleaner please (removed Storyline deviations, polished text, consistency, Figure perfection)
  • 4.2. Phone-to-phone censorship-free network. Deviates from storyline. Replace or remove. other angle; Zero-server architecture is selected because it created a zero-cost public infrastructure to facilitate a Create Commons infrastructure of digitally shared cultural heritage artefacts.
  • Sections are too short within entire thesis. Merge 2.4 into 2.3 and also: "2.5. Slow and inaccurate royalty payments"
  • Remove fragementation: 3.3.1. Audius. More readable without these headers
  • More scientific angle "3.4. Financial transparency in the music industry". Citations for this 'The exact overhead and spending in the industry seems to be hidden. Where all the money goes is unclear, but it does not goes to the musicians.'
  • "The overall design of the system can be seen in fig. 4.1.", please move this after the great text box; make it flow beautifully.
  • "4.7. Establishing trust and reducing sybil attacks", 4.7 trustworthy public infrastructure with attack-resilience
  • Table 5.2: Code coverage overviewTable 5.2: Code coverage overview: please add "Total Lines of Code" for all your work.
  • Figure 6.4: Average time spent per download stage; cleaner: make it a graph going to 120 seconds.
  • 5.11. Quality assurance: "In order to preserve quality of code we make use of continuous integration", claim credit for all the nice work you did. like 'Quality assurance is particular important aspect of this thesis work. With high quality code we facilitate potential re-usage of our ideas and implementation within industries outside the music business. We used industry best-practices such as continous integration'... 'Finally we used 20 unique Android smartphones for hands-on bug mitigation, User Experience uniformity, and performance analysis. Table X lists the various... During the implementation phase we ensured that MusicDAO operates smoothly on all these different Android versions, screens, and processors.'

[Tim-W]

I got a second bootstrap server succesfully running thanks to Sandip.

• Reduced the music gossip time for a few devices; 5 Androids are now sending music blocks every 0.5 seconds (on day&night).
• An actual end-to-end video of peer-to-peer libtorrent and bitcoin payment! The phone on the left is the only uploader and published the "John Doe" album. The tablet consumes it and sends bitcoins to the phone. See here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XKU91P0lShjQHtztdCMpFC6U4sAy-cfx/view?usp=sharing Will record a better version of this for the final defense presentation.

[synctext]

Nice!, please push speed (initial music discovery) and robustness (bootstraping) improvements to Android store. today if you can.

[Tim-W]

Updates week 1 of writing

* Started on a more coherent Introduction and main storyline (theory around robot economy still needs some work): Problem of centralization/platformization on the Internet > What is a robot economy (theory) -> What is a robot economy in software? -> What does it achieve (key characteristics) -> Problem of centralization in music industry -> Our first steps towards robot economy: MusicDAO * Added conclusion + generalization of our framework * Started on Future work (will be very long, so should this be a separate chapter?) * Reduced focus on censorship-resilience * Evaluation: P2P bootstrap problem section * Evaluation: Battery usage section * Evaluation: Scalability * Evaluation: improved graph Content discovery and fixed maths * Implementation: improved quality assurance section * Design: add content popularity gossiping algorithm * Design: add centralized vs. phone-to-phone netwokr diagrams * Overall: Improve layout of images * Overall: Improve layout of sections, reduce fragmentation of sub(sub)sections * Problem description: added financial transparency section * Problem description: added figure of music revenue over time in different sectors

In other news: Effect of TorrentFreak publication first day

Updates week 2 of writing

* Rewritten introduction and reformatted problem description * Added sketch: Robot economy in software, visualized:  * Added overview of main contributions of our thesis in introduction * Problem description: add table market share of music labels * Proofread of chapters 1,2,3 and small changes * State of the Art: improved AI DAO section + add figure * Problem description: add more graphs showing reduction in Artist Income over time + add more latest numbers * State of the Art: improved "Decentralized Music Distribution Technologies" sec + figures * Cleanup of Design section + added AIDA algorithm * Evaluation: improved Scalability sec * Overall: made all sections roughly the same length (if they were too long, added subsections) * Implementation: add Content Popularity gossip algorithm * Implementation: improve keyword search algorithm sec + add screenshots * Implementation: make introduction more clear

MSc_Thesis_25-02-2021.pdf

[synctext]

52 pages :+1: quick remarks, that robot economy architecture picture is great! Please make this the centerpiece of your solution and final thesis presentation. This is the future of the firm! Spend a few hours to make it stand-out if possible:

• remove the distributed data store
• "Collective Money" as separate box :ballot_box:
• give it an aesthetically pleasing star-shape with DAO at center with 4 connecting items (users,creators,robo infra,money)
• polished icons for everything, like open source:
• Icon for AI, single icon for user, icon for creative type/artist :art: , green icon for money :dollar: (or use the €10 banknote which is red :euro:)

[Tim-W]

More updates week 2 of writing

• Overall: made all sections roughly the same length (if they were too long, added subsections)
• Improved robot economy image, improved its storyline in connection to 3.2 "AI+DAO" and Design intro
• Implementation: add Content Popularity gossip algorithm
• Implementation: improve keyword search algorithm sec + add screenshots
• Implementation: make introduction more clear
• Evaluation: analyzed total money flow of donations to artists, improved graphs
• Evaluation: analyzed the influx of users from TorrentFreak impacting the transactions as registered by bitcoin node

• Add comparison to related work:

  Received first feedback from Georgy https://github.com/Tim-W/msc-thesis/pull/1 - he is working on more feedback MSc-Thesis-26-02-2021.pdf

[synctext]

• :green_circle: Green light, thesis is sufficiently ready to schedule a master thesis defense.
• Main issue with this thesis, still everything is described from engineering perspective. Science perspective secondary (e.g. "meaning there are 13,734 Android devices supported" in main chapter intro text).
• "Democratic user engagement" suggest not negative cross, but 'out of scope'. (evolution and AI are both: "ongoing research" with a Github issue citation)
• citation style, (Rayna & Striukova, 2009), switch to "[9]" if not too much work.
• consistency in: figure style (sketch,color,icon), language used, Figure centrering (versus table left aligned).
• "How can we design and implement a music streaming service that distributes the power from one authority to its users?" or 'How can we design and implement a music streaming service that prevents natural monopolies and transfers all power to Internet users?' ref
• Section 3.5 could use a forward pointer. "The Superapp is the software framework used within this thesis".
• 3.7 "Another is the FileCoin" missing text.
• Section 4.13 exists! Merge these small subsection and reduce it to Section 4.6 maximum. (e.g. Peer-to-peer music discovery and sharing)
• "table 5.1 Overview of our work compared to related work" make your two positive check more distinctive ( bold and/or green).
• "5.2.2. Gossip-based algorithm for content popularity", section too small
• 100% crash-free! :sunglasses: :cool: :sunglasses: "Figure 5.12: Firebase Crashlytics crash reporter; this figure shows the crashes over time"
• rename please "6.2. public release experiment"
• More clearly: Bitcoin DAO fork 1 hour block creation interval (not only inside brackets in a figure caption)
• wow, "Figure 6.8: Search latency of performing keyword search"
• "99.9996%" please add more bits of accuracy
• 6.5. 'infrastructure cost analysis' , too engineering details: "Bitcoin node and transaction fees"

[Tim-W]

Updates to report and evaluation/experimentation

• Tab 1.1: mention related work instead of "out of scope"
• Incorporate feedback from Georgy
• In general: improve layout so that most sections are around half a page, reduce fragmentation of short (sub)sections
• Improve tab 5.1, also overall more "positivity" in tables
• Overhaul of chap 4 layout: 13 sections -> 7 sections
• Rewrite 4.2
• Improved robot eco diagram, Re-made fig. 1.2 with consistent style. Added consistent style for all the diagrams I made.
• Replace package diagram -> component diagram (5.1). Improved architecture diagram in Design.
• Changed research question throughout
• Chapter 7: Improved conclusion throughout
• Chapter 1: Improved introduction throughout
• Added preface
• Added abstract
  Improved test coverage, add LOC to table. Most non-ui code is covered with Unit tests

  

Updates to Evaluation (re-done some experiments, updated some analysis

• More accurate tx fees
• Block creation interval more clearly
• Overall explain the experiments and results more detailed, rewrites
• Renaming: (un)supervised -> (un)controlled experiments, public release experiment
• Improve 6.5

Re-done n=10 content discovery experiment as the previous run suffered from network congestion

Re-done search latency experiment, now timed without UI rendering time

Improved analysis: BTC Faucet Responsiveness experiment throughout a full month (d=28)

Please note, app activations are here also recorded **outside of google play**, so also local test devices are incorporated in the data (the data is from Crashlytics _first_open_ event). The lines should overlap. Reasons for no overlapping can be: - Red above blue: activations which only use other mini-apps inside trustchain superapp (opened the app, but never opened MusicDAO) - Server outages or Firebase Analytics precision faults

Improved analysis of artist income vs. Google Play installs:

Clarified experiment: phone-to-phone vs. central server+phones topology

Abstract (draft)

During the last decades of explosive growth in economic value on the Internet, we observe the trend of platformization: a shift of economic activity from happening on a wide range of companies to a few major platforms run by Big Tech corporations. This trend is highly susceptible to the rise of monopolies and oligarchs, as seen in the music industry today. In this industry, the top 5 streaming services and top 3 labels form oligarchs. Artist income is diminishing because these powerful intermediaries take large revenue cuts. Streaming services also have curatorial power: they decide the inner workings of their black box recommendation systems. As an alternative for centralized Internet platforms, this thesis presents a theoretical framework for building a robot economy in software: autonomous software in which robots perform monetary transactions on their own. It allows for building infrastructure for the common good: software systems that (1) handle financial transactions in a fair way, as (2) decided by democratic engagement, (3) run transparently and autonomously, (4) are open to any participant (permissionless), (5) are decentralized and leaderless, (6) support a self-evolving codebase, and finally (7) can make intelligent decisions on their own using AI. We show a proof-of-concept of this framework, by implementing features 1,3,4 and 5. We present a fully operational decentralized music streaming, publishing and discovery mobile app (called MusicDAO) with peer-to-peer donations to artists. It is built on a fully distributed, self-scaling network of Android phones. The app was released to the public, and was installed on 50+ devices. During this public trial, the decentral financial infrastructure was successful: most music streaming platforms take a 20-40\% cut of music revenue; MusicDAO takes <0.001\%. Discovery and metadata search is operational with low latency. Peer-to-peer music streaming is operational, but its latency is not yet competitive. Our framework and proof-of-concept are fruitful steps towards research into infrastructure for the common good: software systems that are governed by its users instead of by profit-driven corporations.

New version of MSc thesis:

Update march 12: proofread everything, many small updates throughout entire thesis to make it a better flow/storyline. Update march 13: Improved robot eco diagram, Re-made fig. 1.2 with consistent style. Added consistent style for all the diagrams I made. Replaced package diagram with a more simplified component diagram (5.1). Improved architecture diagram in Design. Improved conclusion. Added abstract and preface. Improved introduction. Improved conclusion. Update march 14: Improved explanation of our robot economy framework in 1.2

https://github.com/Tim-W/msc-thesis/blob/master/report.pdf