Introducing Altostream
Altostream is a music streaming platform that uses blockchain technology to facilitate payments from users directly to the creators. With an initial beachhead focused on Afro-Beats in Africa, Altostream will use the blockchain as the payment layer for their ground-breaking platform that puts the power back in the hands of creators, curators, and listeners.
We Can End an Epidemic: Unjust Treatment of Artists!
Altostream will leverage the authenticated, transparently accounted power of blockchain smart contracts to fairly reward value to Creators, Curators, and the Community on the platform via top blockchain networks.
Altostream has unique identifiers for contributors, infrastructure providers, app developers, and validators, including listeners and artists, allowing any music content platform to adopt the same usage to properly identify and record contributions made by stakeholders.
What makes us passionate about building Altostream?
This is because, we’re focused on the creators, we’ve designed the system to be cheat-proof, more affordable for listeners, and have a higher streaming revenue for artists. It’s music to the ears, literally.
All current music streaming platforms extract value from the Creators (musicians/artists) via exploitative contracts. They supplant Curators (DJs, music journalists) by flexing algorithms to source playlists. Ultimately, this undercuts the formation of music Communities that dynamically interact, co-create, and celebrate their cultural connection. Music streaming platforms evolved to solve the issue of piracy, but now they’ve turned out to be the pirates themselves.
We want Altostream to achieve a balanced system to favor all its contributors and to ensure every decision aligns with all parties' interests.
Project Details:
The core concept: $ALTO tokens, reward Creators for sharing their music on the platform, Curators for sharing and promoting the Creators’ music, and the Community of music fans for engaging with Creators and Curators.
Altostream’s listener base will:
- Pay a standard fee by listening to unlimited streaming of songs.
- Their fee gets converted to tokens on Altostream’s backend.
- Tokens are proportionally rewarded to Altostream creators and curators.
For example, let’s say the day is July 1st, 2021. Johnny subscribes to Altostream for $5.99 a month to listen to unlimited ad-free streaming. Because Altostream just launched, doesn’t have many users, and doesn’t have many artists yet, it is worth 5999 tokens. At the end of the month, every artist (or playlist curator) he listened to during July will receive an allocation of his total tokens proportional to his engagement with their creative or curatorial value.
Now let’s say it’s a year later, July 1st, 2022. Johnny is still a subscriber at $5.99 for unlimited streaming. However, Altostream is now far more popular and has many users and artists. Instead of Johnny’s $5.99 earning him 5999 tokens, it is now only worth 59 tokens. Johnny can still listen to the same amount of unlimited music, and at the end of January, the artists (or playlist curators) still receive a proportional allocation of his total $5.99 worth of tokens.
It’s just fewer tokens because the token price has increased by 100x. They receive the same total payout value so they are happy and the early token holders are VERY happy because their tokens have appreciated 100x.
As Altostream’s bank of tokens draws down, the scarcity drives the price of each token to increase dramatically until it hits a market equilibrium. When artists want to sell their tokens and cash out they sell them back to Altostream at the current token price. Those tokens go back into the Altostream market for sale.
Community members will be incentivized to become Curators or even Creators in their own right, and could potentially be paid by Curators or Creators in $ALTO to engage in promotional activity. The $ALTO token creates an entire musical economic platform where the only limit to the Community’s generativity is imagination.
Ecosystem fit: How can the project benefit the ecosystem?
The streaming music arena is cacophonously crowded — Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Google all offer elite-engineered streaming music services. Startups entering the space will find few customers who haven’t already made their streaming platform choice. Plus, it would be next to impossible to beat these entrenched multi-billion dollar behemoths on customer price value.
Amazon and Google use music as loss-leader content to keep users within their bundled ecosystems — “Listen to Amazon music so we can have you pay attention to buying from Amazon.” Apple and Spotify offer unlimited play and downloads for multiple users for only $14.99 a month. Simply put, streaming startups entering the music market can’t compete head-to-head against unlimited play for less than the price of a cup of coffee.
There is a tremendous opportunity to not only enter the streaming music space but overturn it completely. The iTunes store leveraged new technology — bigger hard drives to hold songs, faster internet for downloads — to usurp the record industry. Spotify gave Apple a taste of its own medicine and disrupted the iTunes store by leveraging high-speed wireless cellular streaming to offer unlimited content. And now, on the cusp of the blockchain revolution, there is an opportunity to disrupt the creative content delivery industry once again. Enter Altostream.
The critical question for Altostream is “Where is the new leverage point in the streaming music industry to disrupt?” The answer is Payments, specifically the rewarding of fair value to the three core Cs of the music industry: Creation, Curation, and Community, and all this will be done using the blockchain.
Community members will be incentivized to become Curators or even Creators in their own right, and could potentially be paid by Curators or Creators in $ALTO to engage in promotional activity. The $ALTO token creates an entire musical economic platform where the only limit to the Community’s generativity is imagination.
Helpful Links
- Whitepaper — https://altostream-production.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/Altostream+-+LitepaperV2+%5BUpdate+2022%5D.pdf
- Website — https://altostream.app
- Wallet — https://wallet.altostream.app
- Altostream for listeners — https://music.altostream.app
- Altostream for Artists — https://artist.altostream.app
