There is an interesting trend of articles talking about bitcoin by referring to the blockchain, but not bitcoin.
The Ujo royalties idea seems an improvement. I wonder if PeerTracks will survive the SEC.
What a disappointing article. PeerTracks is trading baseball cards while Ujo is a payments system. Replace Spotify or Last.fm with a torrent network and tie a blockchain onto that, and you've got something. Fuck around with digital baseball cards and you've got digital baseball cards.
Yeah, but you've got to give someone incentive to host the software that will track such things, and you've got to incentivize the actual streaming of the actual media files. You can either do that distributed (thus, bittorrent) or centralized... and if you're centralizing, how is it any different from Spotify? Create a peer-to-peer streaming service with monetization and the music industry is effectively dead forever.
My impression is that Ujo is a smart contract service, and that Spotify would be a party to a contract. That is, Ujo gets a cut (or fee) for contract creation and management, and Spotify could earn a cut of a contract by making songs available on their streaming service. A t-shirt company could sell band t-shirts similarly by making a contract with the artists via Ujo. The royalty payout system is decentralized, but contract creation wouldn't need to be, and in this case, probably wouldn't benefit from it. Of course, you could have decentralized contract creation like Lighthouse, but you lose a lot of incentives that provide for ease of use and adoption. Perhaps someday someone will make an OpenBazaar for music, but I don't know how you could be sure you were paying the genuine artists unless there was a trusted attribution database somewhere, I see Ujo as trying to be that database.
So like a Popcorn Time for music? I had an idea for something like this, where you can pay as much as you want (including nothing, because it's piracy) per day/week/month/year (in BTC), and your money would be evenly distributed to the artists you listen to by how much time/many tracks you listen to of each artist. And if you have a BTC address for an artist, a donate button could be added on their page to give straight to them.