Image by: SM Belal License: Fair Use

Spread the Word

We’ve heard about the Ice Bucket Challenge, which was one of the most successful viral marketing campaigns ever. We’d love to say that if you tell 7 friends and they tell seven friends who also tell seven friends that we’d penetrate six degrees of separation. Sadly, as explained by Watts, Peretti and Frumin in their short article Viral Marketing for the Real World, featured in the Harvard Review in January of 2007, Vol 85(5), it is not that easy. To be successful, a grass roots cause like Fair Trade Music Distribution needs what is known as a big seed, a social influencer who spreads the message to hundreds of thousands of people, who tell a friend. Thankfully, the music world is not that large, so musicians telling musicians about Fair Trade Music Distribution has a chance of reaching people with large followings, who remember what it was like to struggle as an independent musician.

So, here is what you can do to spread the word. Tell your musician friends about this website. Tell your booking agents, club owners, fans and anyone else you think may have music industry connections. Finally, use the following script in your own words and post a video to your social media channels.

This is about a five minute script.

There was a time, in the pre-digital-streaming past, that independent composers and musicians were able to support themselves with earnings from selling their music. That can be a reality once again.

Streaming music is here to stay. It's convenient, saves space on mobile devices, is cross platform and gives listeners access to unbelievably large music libraries. Any new way for artists to earn money from their music, will need to work in harmony with the thriving streaming economic model, already in place. The Fair Trade Music Distribution Group has created a new concept for a Play on Demand integrated NFT license that does exactly that.

Before Internet and music streaming, physical recordings were the way everyone listened to music at home. People bought records, compact discs and tapes. Musicians got paid a percentage of those sales. Back in the 1970’s, by selling about 20000 recordings, a singer-songwriter could earn a middle class living. While it might seem like owning that piece of vinyl or plastic, with sound recorded on it, was the artist’s product, it wasn’t. Being able to play their music when ever and where ever, or Play on Demand, was the real product. No one realized it back then, because having a physical copy of music was obviously being able to play it on demand. There was no other way to play it.

It wasn’t until the streaming age that a separation of a physical recording and Play on Demand right became important. Today’s music streaming can be compared to listening to radio in the era of physical recordings. Listeners didn’t have to own a song to hear it. They just waited for it to be played on air, or they called the radio station and asked for it to be played. Although the song was almost never played right away, sooner or later a listener would usually get to hear their favorite song. Today’s music streaming, on the other hand, is like having a disc jockey on call. Listeners can hear their favorite song just like they own the physical recording; but they don’t. And there is the problem. Musicians no longer earn money by selling music. They earn money by streaming music. Stream on Demand, is not the same as Play on Demand.

For an artist to be able to earn a middle class living now, they need to have about 65 million streams. Let’s think about that. In the age of physical recordings if a musician reached 20 thousand fans, they could make a decent living. Now a musician has to have well over a million fans playing their song at least once a week to do that. Only A-List artists can muster a fan base that large.

For indie musicians to thrive, they need to be able to sell music in the age of streaming. They need the Fair Trade Music Distribution Group, who have a concept, which will provide a parallel music sales channel that doesn’t disrupt the current streaming economic model, but instead establishes a synergistic relationship leveraging technologies already in the mainstream.

How is this done? By using a blockchain record to prove ownership of a Play on Demand license. Blockchain technology such as the non-fungible token, or NFT, was designed to provide a publicly accessible transaction record for a unique item. In the recent past there has bee wild speculation on digital art, which has given NFTs a bad name. But, if NFTs are used to provide verification of ownership for a Play on Demand license, they work very well. The Fair Trade Music Distribution Group calls this, NFT integrated Play on Demand, or ‘Nifty Pod’.

Nifty Pods take the place of physical recordings and will once again allow musicians to sell their music directly to their fans. It works like this. When a listener wants to hear a new song by their favorite artist, they use their favorite streaming service to play it. If they don’t own a NFTiPod for that song, they can buy one for about a dollar. The artist, gets 90% of that amount. From then on, no matter what streaming service a listener uses, they can play that song on demand. If they get tired of the song, they can use an online NFT marketplace like OpenSea, to sell it, just like buying and selling used vinyl records or CDs back in the day. With Nifty Pods in the streaming age, indie artists will have the same opportunity as those in the age of physical recordings to make a decent living.

If you are an artist, check out the website, then spread the word to your friends. If you want to invest in the technology envisioned by the Fair Trade Music Distribution Group, or just want to know more about the concept, check out the website.

The link is shown on the screen. It’s https://ftmdg.com.

Thanks for listening and spread the word to make this dream a reality.