How does one disrupt a market without disrupting the business? Add value. The problem to be solved was, how to put more money into the pockets of independent musicians, composers and music industry professionals within a streaming marketplace, where 5,420,000 streams a month is needed to earn a middle class salary. Here is a summary of the business model, supported by our technology.

Streaming content is here to stay. Even though mobile devices have incredible memory capacity, being able to leverage cloud storage provides great user benefits, such as common libraries across devices, virtually infinite choice and immediate availability of new releases. Any music distribution model that disrupts the current music streaming ecosystem will be met with resistance from both consumers and streaming services.

A Non-Fungible Token is similar to any other block chain token, but rather than being ubiquitous and equivalent to all other tokens in the chain, is related to a unique entity. NFT’s fell in and out of investor favor during 2022. It was difficult for investors to couple what was essentially a block chain record, to a digital asset that could easily be duplicated, or a physical entity that was not somehow linked within the NFT data element. Content creators even tried to release music as NFT products, mostly unsuccessfully, outside the crypto investment community. For NFTs to be successful they need to have inherent value. NFT integrated Play on Demand (NFTiPoD, pronounced Nifty Pod) provides that.

Ethereum based transactions provide the means by which content creators and other contributors can receive renumeration for their work each time a Play on Demand (PoD) license is sold. In this way, a secondary music economy is created that supports both independent and recording company releases, which in turn, is good for the music industry and music fans alike.

For personal Play on Demand licensing to fit seamlessly into today’s streaming ecosystem, validation must be centralized, quick, inexpensive and simple. The Fair Trade Music Distribution Group will full those requirements by providing the processing infrastructure and a client API to allow streaming vendors to verify that a subscriber PoD request corresponds to a valid NFTiPoD license.

Since a NFTiPoD provides innate value, by granting its owner the right to access a digital asset whenever desired, a secondary economy for music is created. Streaming services, content creators and retailers can sell NFTiPoD licenses to consumers and in turn, license owners can resell their NFTiPOD through digital asset markets.