“I’ve had pretty much every accolade there is to get in this business of music,” Matt Sorum says from a sterile-looking suite at the Element hotel in downtown Austin. Hundreds of feet below, locals and out-of-towners alike flood the city streets for the music portion of SXSW, eager to catch a glimpse of their lifelong favorite artists and buzz-worthy newcomers. But Sorum — who’s played drums in Guns N’ Roses, Velvet Revolver, the Cult and most recently hard rock supergroup Kings of Chaos — isn’t here for to play any official SXSW showcases. He’s here to debut
Artbit operates on
hashgraph, a distributed ledger platform created by cryptocurrency startup
Hedera that processes hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. Sorum cofounded the company with the goal of giving unsigned artists — from musicians to dancers to street performers and more — a platform on which they can release their art and build a community amongst themselves and with their fans, while protecting their intellectual property and eliminating middlemen to get paid fairly and promptly. These artist/fan interactions will generate income for both parties, thus incentivizing Artbit users to engage frequently with each other.
Sorum explains all of this during our half-hour conversation, which is often more of a monologue, as I am still woefully unfamiliar with the world of cryptocurrency. (Perhaps that’s why he’s the famous one.) The drummer has huge plans for Artbit, like introducing gamification and augmented reality elements, as well as hosting an Artbit festival in the future. But for now, he says, “It’s just a matter of building a community.”
Tell me about the genesis of Artbit, your thought process behind it and your goals for the platform.
A lot of people have been thinking about, “What’s the solution to cleaning up this noise?” — what we call the noise of the music business. It’s gotten easier, in some sense, to put yourself up on different platforms and say, “Hey, here I am,” but it’s harder to be seen, in a way, because there’s so much traffic out there. In the old days, there were record labels that directed all your attention to that, because there was no internet and there was no noise.
As an older artist, somebody that’s got a career, you’re able to decide anything that goes with your art — “I don’t want to be affiliated with that brand,” or “I don’t want any commercials, because I’m already successful.” But what happens to the young artists? Now, it’s become more acceptable to be affiliated with brands, as [musicians], because it’s a way of [a means to an end], right? How can I monetize myself? I’ve got to license my music. I’ve got to try to get on a commercial. I’ve got to try to get on a television show. There’s no monetization in streaming. No one’s downloading music anymore, really. No one’s buying records.
Well, along comes Artbit. The Artbit concept is, “Come on our platform, be totally secure, an artist community and fan community.” Fans and artists together both are monetized from the get-go, from Artbit coin number one. It’s not like you have to get one million views to finally get paid, or, “I’m gonna go on Spotify and hope that I stream one million times and still make $1,000.” So, this is more of a way to put yourself up right away and have monetization.
How does Artbit work, practically speaking?
The engine that’s gonna run Artbit is called Hedera hashgraph. It’s a new public ledger... the safer, faster, more secure public ledger, which would be called distributed ledger, like what we see from what
Blockchainis doing with Bitcoin. When we found hashgraph, we knew that we had a system fast enough for people to connect and be able to exchange quickly — 250,000 times faster than Blockchain — on cellular phones. So we thought, “We could be the first crypto-related site and a public ledger that has a community.” And I think we are the first. And I think for people to actually sort of go and have fun and learn kind of what crypto’s about — it isn’t about putting the money in your wallet and just holding onto it. This is about building a community together. So there will be a gamification layer to this where you have to play with the coins to be able to build the community, and everyone earns together, if that makes any sense.
Can you give me an example of how this would play out for Artbit users?
So, if there’s a busker on the street and he’s playing a guitar, and all those people around are filming, but they’re doing it on Artbit, they’re gonna launch all their content on Artbit, and they’re gonna be automatically linked to that performer. And the way that will work will be, they’ll see him, his information will come up on hashgraph, and then everyone — depending on who puts branding, filters, like a Snapchat-type filter, but you can augment it with augmented reality — you’ll be paid that way. So people will earn for the amount of content they put up. Coins will automatically enter your wallet. Why? Because you’ve already signed the smart contract, telling everybody on the hashgraph ledger what you’re doing. I know it sounds complicated, but it’s not as complicated as it sounds.
So fans get rewarded for interacting with artists, and artists get rewarded for engaging those fans?
That’s right. I’ve always thought, artists are the ones that get the accolades, but what about the fans? For me, I always say thank you to the fans. If it wasn’t for the fans, I wouldn’t have a career, I wouldn’t have a house, I wouldn’t have a car, none of it. So why shouldn’t they have an opportunity to come and be part of the process? We’re gonna have a layer to Artbit where you can actually invest in that artist. You can be a part of that company, so to speak. You’re not gonna be a partner, because the beauty about crypto is that you aren’t an equity owner. You’re only a coin owner. It’s a different thing, you understand? You don’t say, “I own a piece of him.” You don’t own a piece. You don’t own anything. No one owns anybody. But you have a coin piece of that artist. So your coin is your currency that is gonna retain part of that.
There’s already a solution with this kind of stuff to solve every middleman aspect of the music business. For instance, publishing. You know how publishing works, right? Someone writes the song, there’s five songwriters. At some point down the line, we’ll have a library of music. I’m not saying when that’s gonna be. It’ll be probably an update on the app. Update now and you’ll get the new thing. So we’re gonna have to do layers of updates.
Right, as more people join the community.
We’ve got 20 ideas down the line that we have to do in phases. But imagine if you bought that particular song and you wanted to download that piece of music. That money that went in, let’s say it’s 99 cents. That money will all automatically be distributed right then, on that particular purchase, to all the contributors of that song. Now, there could be a sharing aspect on Artbit, where a dancer uses somebody else’s song, and that song ends up in some guy’s movie that’s on Artbit. He’s doing a film, and he saw the dancer, and he wants to use that piece, or whatever. Now they’re all together. Now they create this other work. That’s intellectual property. When that system starts to be put in, that money will split between three of them because of the hashgraph technology. That’s how smart it is.
That’s why crypto is really freaking people out. They’re going, “Whoa, how does this work?” Well, here’s how it works. It’s direct source. It just goes in. Banking systems have already picked up hashgraph to run their banking financial systems, because they’re so accurate and secure and fast. It’s not like, “I’m gonna wire you the money. Oh, it takes five days.”
More conventional music streaming platforms take pretty sizable cuts from an artist's paycheck when their music is streamed or downloaded. Does Artbit take a percentage of artists’ earnings?
The community is gonna build the monetization of Artbit. It’s gonna be like when you see Instagram’s worth whatever amount of money, same with Artbit. From what I’ve heard, iTunes’ download system is gonna go away. Why? Because people are streaming, and that’s just the wave of the future. You can’t fight it.
You said that monetization on Artbit stems from fans and artist engaging with each other. What happens next? What do they do with that currency?
They can get out and take that money and go on tour, and start to build their brand like any other artist. And there will be people coming along, trying to take people off Artbit and trying to offer you some deal someplace else. That’s okay. You make the decision. If you still want to get into the model that’s out there that’s left, some of the independent labels or whatever, and you think that’s the right place for you to go, now you have the decision, and you have the power, because you’ve already got success. You’ve got to remember, most labels are looking for people out there already on
YouTube and everything else, and they’ve done all the work. Now these labels that are left are just coming along saying, “Have you seen this kid on YouTube? He’s amazing! And now we’re gonna get on the bandwagon!”
Do you think there’s any scenario in which it would benefit young artists to leave Artbit and sign with a conventional label, for booking and management purposes?
No, because we could do that on Artbit, too. Obviously there’s all the big companies that are out there running a lot of venues, but there’s still the independent venues. You could do your own thing. Book your own venue. That’s all possible. We’re gonna have Artbit stages, we’re gonna do a lot of that. I have a dream of an Artbit festival. We could do a lot of cool shit. It’s just a matter of building a community.
So though Artbit, a brilliant 20-year-old songwriter with no business experience could connect with people who understand the music industry and want to help them?
Sure. That’s another thing. As an artist, you learn along the way, the business aspect. Because it can get hairy, and as a creator, that’s a whole other part of the game. Obviously when I started out, I didn’t care much about anything except playing music, and I had to learn fast about how to deal with the rest of it, about contracts and agents and managers and promoters and everything else, the ins and outs of the music business. But maybe we’ll have a tutorial on Artbit, too. I’m an advisor, I’d be happy to advise a person at a certain point. Maybe we’ll have a staff for those people that can advise, give suggestions.
Once the community’s built, we’ll be able to help. I want this to be the safest place for artists to go and really trust there’s no being taken advantage of, and have free reign to express themselves, and be able to monetize a career from the get-go and not struggle. So many talented probably just end up giving up… You have to be a very strong individual to try to go through the havoc of trying to make it as an artist, musician, painter, dancer. You have to really have a lot of perseverance and determination. So many humans don’t have that extra thing, and that leaves a lot of talent by the wayside.
Do you have a timeline for your goals with Artbit?
By next year, I would like to be able to have a show or a series of shows [at SXSW] with some of our greatest artists on the platform. Me and some of the other advisors, we’ll find them and invite them. That’s what I’d like to do. And then I would like to build that. You’re here with us, it’s almost like we become — I don’t want to say a label, but we’re a home for them. We support them. And they can do all of their own business aspect of things. They can be in control of their destiny. But that’s a goal, and then launching these series of ideas I have to help the artists: a catalog of songs that could be licensed to film and TV that the Artbit community can provide, that kind of thing. Those platforms are out there, but this would be Artbit artists, period. But they’ve got to buy those songs with crypto, they’ve got to buy them with Artbit.
This is no different than the digital age of music, when people were going, “What’s happening?” And record labels completely missed the boat on that one, didn’t they? They didn’t even think, “Maybe we should buy Napster.” That would’ve been smart.
Instead they just freaked out.
They freaked out and said, “That’s gonna go away,” just like they’re saying about crypto. It’s not going away.
