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Music Streaming Today: Innovation at the Red Light
Oftentimes, when discussing the evolution of humanity and our progression from hunter-gatherers to space-faring civilizations, we tend to generalize what we describe as technological progress and view it, in a sense, universally. By doing so, we gloss over the countless professions, cultures, and industries that have evolved alongside every single advancement.
One such industry is that of music, which has witnessed these changes for almost as long as humanity itself. We’ve come a long way since mere drums and woodwinds, and just as we were able to etch our favorite songs onto physical media, we were able to send them nationwide through electromagnetic waves and into people’s ears.
Nowadays, you don’t need vinyl records, a needle, and a pair of speakers to play music. Indeed, the same innovative human spirit has made this ancient hobby as seamless and as accessible as possible… or has it? Relatively speaking, listening to music is easier than it has ever been, but what truly has improved over the past half-decade?
When we look at the most popular streaming services, not only do we find a lot of similarities between them, but also, very few key differentiators. Spotify is perhaps most known for its recommendation algorithm, something users overwhelmingly praise. YouTube Music easily onboards users from YouTube and keeps them in a wider ecosystem. Apple Music offers hi-res lossless music quality…
While these are all valid differences, the scene has arguably been frozen in place for years.
How One App Is Shaking Things Up
Davinci is a platform that our readers might be familiar with, as we’ve covered it before. It is a fan engagement platform, built using Cere’s extensive set of tools, that recognizes music streaming, not as a standalone thing, but as a main pillar lifting something far greater—a bridge between artists and fans.
All major music streaming services start and stop at the exact same spot; they’re almost exclusively streaming platforms that barely deviate from a recurring and limiting design philosophy. Davinci, however, raises a very interesting question: why can’t fans and artists, the two most important elements of this equation, decide this for themselves?
In other words: what if streaming platforms could do so much more?
As it turns out, they could. While Davinci does support high-quality music streaming, it offers far more than almost any other platform out there. For instance, collectibles play a significant role in its ecosystem; they can be bought or distributed in a variety of different ways, can be traded in external secondary marketplaces, can be set to provide royalties for the original artists, and so on. The collectibles themselves also vary in type and function; they can represent one’s ownership of art, they can be personalized memorabilia, some may carry exclusive perks and bonuses, and others may be redeemed for merch or other goodies.
The same platform also supports events–both digital and in the real world–the nature and size of which are, of course, entirely up to the artists. With digital events being vastly more customizable, they can range anywhere from exclusive content drops to online meetups, with various levels of gamification and engagement parameters to meet any particular need or goal.
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But if Davinci can do it, why can’t Spotify, or Apple?
Powered by Cere’s Dragon 1
Dragon 1, Cere’s DDC (Decentralized Data Clusters) network, is the roaring engine underneath Davinci’s hood. It is the infrastructure that is essential to realize the goals of the application and turn its ideas into functioning features.
For one, it allows high-quality permissioned streaming to users worldwide. Thanks to Dragon 1’s architecture, the way the data clusters (and the data load) are distributed has significant implications for speed and latency. Since all the content is stored in Dragon 1, all Davinci would have to do is verify the ownership or access to said content through Cere’s global NFT registry, and just like that, users can listen to their favorite albums or watch live performances without any additional steps.
In fact, processes such as encryption, decryption, filtering, labeling, analysis, and so on, is seamlessly automated by global data clusters, which are also optimized to process data both according to type and region. This lifts a lot of burden off developers and applications and delivers far superior performance while simultaneously offering them more resources to leverage.
User data is also among the various data types that can be stored in Cere’s DDC, which can also be analyzed and processed in numerous different ways to the edge. The processed data can then be utilized by applications built on Cere for virtually any purpose the imagination can brew up. For instance, in the case of Davinci, user data such as streaming, engagement, event-going, and so on, can be gathered and used as a basis for automatic rewards. This paves the way for a new level of artist and fan engagement, where, thanks to decentralized storage and data indexing, artists can configure setups to monitor their most loyal fans and offer them exclusive journeys and experiences.
The best part? Users actually own the content they buy, which is permissioned, encrypted, stored, and immutable.
Rethinking Digital Media
With the right resources, projects like Davinci have been able to look at music streaming platforms through an entirely new lens, through which they saw an opportunity to reshape how people interact with music, and, ultimately, their creators. By leveraging Cere’s tools, Davinci successfully built a platform where both sides of the equation were not only able to engage with one another but also act reciprocally without having to go through any hoops to do so.
This has allowed us to rethink how other media function and can function, and a lot about the existing underlying infrastructure tells us what we need to know about their state.
Like art, the path towards innovation is paved in part with creativity and part capability. Just as artists require specific instruments to bring their imagination to life, so too do developers need the right tools to envision and build the ideas that they may one day call their magnum opus. Cere Network, with Dragon 1, offers not just the canvas, but the entire toolkit to help developers gain the edge they need to spring out there and be the change they want to see.
