Future of Music Ownership: X space with Adeniyi & Miso

product because this conversation isn't really about one company. So for the long years of time music has had a simple problem. Are the skate pay last? Police? The slowest? And the dollar you spend takes a lot of time to reach them and it passes through so many people that never touch the music and they take a cut and fans pay every month for years and own nothing at the end of it. And nobody in the middle really has a reason to change that. So this matters more now than you know anytime because AI can make a song for free. So we have all the music isn't really much worth much anymore. What's actually valuable is the relationship between an artist and the people who listen to them and right now neither of them owns that. So the platform in the middle does and this isn't really a music problem. It's more about how money moves and who keeps the records and that part can finally be fixed. So today we're gonna cover three things. How artists actually get paid? What this new infrastructure really saws and what's already been built on top of it? And if you can take one thing away I like that to be this fan only shipping music isn't a someday idea you could build it today. So with me joining us today are Adedi for Miss and Labs and BL for Miso. I'll let you guys introduce yourselves first Adedi. One like. Hey everyone my name is Adani Abiodin. I'm one of the co-founders of Mr. Labs. We are technology company based here in the Bay Area in California. We've been building decentralized infrastructure for quite a while and we came, we're team has spun out of Facebook's meta efforts and our goal is to build decentralized infrastructure that makes it possible to build into mediating products right then. I think what we're talking about today is very very central to enabling some of that. Hey everyone it's Brian here. I am the founder and CEO of Miso and we're building basically like distributed infrastructure that allows the artists to sell their music and for the fans to buy it and for them to be able to do it basically peer to peer. So no one in between them to make it slower and to take the money and we'll be talking a bit more about how it works in this space. Awesome awesome let's get started. So Brian walk us through how music actually works today. Who gets paid? How long does it take and who's holding the money? Yeah so I'll start off by saying the music industry is extremely fractured when I tell Pete, when I tell basically like how it works it really it's quite a shocker. So there's basically two ways that music makes it from the artist to the fan right now. You can either do like streaming or sales and on web too platforms both of those ways are not that great. So I think streaming is what most people probably use the most and how the money flows through streaming is first of all the platform keeps about a third of it. So right off the bat I believe Spotify takes about 31% or something like that and they actually take two to three months to pay out those streams. So if you get one stream the artist does not get paid until two to three months after that. And they also actually don't do any payouts at all if your tracks have less than 1,000 streams. I think that was the rule that they put in back in 2024. So after it leaves Spotify it goes through like five or six different places and these places are kind of in charge of keeping track of who is on a song, what their account is, what their share is, what their split is and it goes through like five or six different places and each place takes like a 10% cut a 9% cut of 15. So by the time that the money actually gets to the artist you're looking at about six to nine months and almost 50% of it is gone. And the main issue actually is not that 50% is gone that's certainly bad but it was those six to nine months that the artist could have been on their next thing already, right? Like if they get paid the same day they can start to work on their next thing. Now they put their new songs onto these platforms, they get paid six to nine months after the fact. So the artist is being held up by the system and unfortunately the system is not going to fix itself because when these entities are able to hold the floats, they're able to invest that stuff into short-term bonds and these other things, right? So they're almost incentivized to be as slow as possible because if they get the money and then they pay it out the next day, they're not going to earn much yield on that. So that's why they sit on the stuff for so long and yeah, it's pretty bad. And then for sales there's platforms like Bandcamp where they do pay out like one or two days after a sale. But then the issue is the person who has the Bandcamp account then has to go through all of these different systems to pay out the people and the job is kind of on that. Right, so right now it's not really that nobody's noticing, it's that the fix has to come from somewhere on the outside, somewhere where we can have proper infrastructure and build outside music. A Denny, I have a question for you, what has this infrastructure, the Sui stack, or like generally going good in the last two or three years, what can you build now that you couldn't three years ago? It's a very good question. I mean, to follow on for what was previously said, right? The incumbents are never really always motivated to do something new. For one, sitting on the treasury is one of them because it earns for them and it screws the artist. Building intermediates and software which just really connects listeners and artists is not in their remit because they want to own that relationship so they can actually either control the artist or extract as much value from the listeners as possible. The goal around Sui was really to build a platform. First, we started with payments and over time, we wanted full applications. Previously, all you can do is maybe, hey, put a smart contract on chain for payments. Well, that doesn't solve the problem because you still need to have to store the music somewhere, right? You want to be able to, the platforms that are currently centralised may decide, hey, I don't like a particular artist or I don't like a particular message, so I'm going to de-platform you entirely. So that element of building to fully intermediates and disintermediated in pieces of software is always hit by gates with Web 2. And even the Web 3, right, you're very restricted because all you could do were simple smart contracts, so large extent, that may be covered payments. What Sui has become over time, we call it a sweet stack, right? What has become over time is the ability to build end-to-end experiences. So we talk about things around like, you know, you have smart contracts that with strong PTPs, namely, namely allows you to execute a number of heterogeneous transactions at once, so you don't have to go transactive with transaction, so you can really construct complicated applications directly on chain using PTPs. And then you have something even more interesting in Waris. Waris lets you store beyond just, you know, transaction records. You can now store the entire front end, the elements of the back end and databases directly on chain and have that run fully without having to use Webster, Amazon Webster services or other, you know, centralized solutions. So the difference really between what happened at the beginning is smart contracts were great because smart contracts let you build logic. Sui brought PTPs, what we call payment intents, namely, let you build a bunch of transactions into one and submit it into a single atomic transaction that lets you build more complicated apps. And then now you have Waris, which is a storage layer that lets you store really large files. You can store music, you can store your entire front end for running a music app, you can store all the history, you can store even everything related to comments that artists receive from the fans as well. So you can build a fully decentralized app finally that removes the need to have intonaries. Awesome. What do you think is still hard like, you know, what do you think hasn't been solved yet? Yeah, I would say the most important thing is this is technology. And technology largely is neutral. You still need to have to solve distribution related problems. And great thing about music is, you know, to large extent that's something that artists solve themselves. If you are an artist, you have people that follow you, you own your own Twitter account, I still call it Twitter, I have to use the call X, you own your own Instagram, you literally have a bunch of people that follow everything that you do. So if you're moving platforms to, you know, something new, you can tell all your supporters to go to that particular platform. I think music is a great, it's a great tick off point for that, right? So if I'm an artist and I have, you know, million followers and I decide I'm going to platform of Spotify and go to something else, well, I'll tell everyone where to go, right? Like Miso is exactly what artists need. So artists can bring their artists are the distribution. An artist can take control more control of the distribution they had before and more of the share of rewards, but literally tell their users where to go and then earn a significant portion more and build better stronger connections with their fan base in their bad before. So blockchains aren't a solve directly for that distribution problem. You still need compelling businesses that has you users who have compelling products that people want to buy and music is a compelling product and users will go to where the music is, they'll go where the artist is to receive that product. So you need great businesses on platform. 100% 100% I think the next question kind of goes to both of you, so whoever wants to answer first. What does it take for a consumer app with real ball even to run on chain without the user ever thinking about it? Maybe Brian, if you want to take us first or? Well, I jump in quickly on that one. And Brian can answer out. I'd say very high level for me is remove the notion of chains from a user, right? A user does not care about the blockchain. A user should not care about coins. It should not care about gas. It shouldn't care about all these technical jogging. So we're throwing away that makes it very impossible to actually interact. A user just wants a product, right? And being able to build a really great experience is very, very key. I've tracked away all the complexities. I want to be able to sign in with Google. I want to be able to sign in with whatever account I already have or using in password. I want to be able to buy my product. I don't want to end my account. I want to be able to start using it right away. Anything short of that becomes really a bad, bad experience. So I think abstract and away complex crypto interactions is key. Brian, what do you think? Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. The only other thing I would add is the difficult thing that we've been experiencing and trying to fix is how to do on ramp and off ramp in a way that is really fast and built into the app. I think that's going to be solved maybe in the next month or so. We're talking with various partners to get a really seamless on ramp and off ramp built into our app. All the other stuff that you just talked about, not needing sweet to pay gas. If anyone has actually used our app, right? You guys know exactly what it's like. It doesn't feel like a web free app. Also, kind of backtracking when we're talking a little bit about the stack. We've made a few posts on Twitter about the stack itself, sweet stack and the miso stack being pretty much identical. So Brian, how are we actually using the stack for me? Can you explain that a bit? Yeah, so I think the stack really starts to be sweet. That's where all of the business side of the platform is built on top of. Everything from how do songs get broken down into shares and split across all of the people who hold rights in the song to how do we take some funds and then route it all to the right places. That is all built on top of sweet and because it's built on sweet, it happens really, really fast. So our V1 deployment is actually spread across 47 move packages, I think. It might be a new record or an app that's built on sweet. And actually all of them are published and we got rid of the upgrade cap. So it is strictly infrastructure that cannot be upgraded or rugged. And is there is going to be there for the rest of time? We specifically chose to do it this way. So the way that we had to plan for this is we kept kind of the core smart contracts extremely slim and focused that on the objective aspects of what we're building and that really distills down to the rights. So rights is stuff that is not going to change. And because we have the slim core, all of these other move code that we put on the chain can be attached to these core things. And that's how we're going to expand the feature set of the platform as time goes on. In a year or two, we might