Federico Scialabba: a stock market with songs and what’s next in the world of music

According to Federico Scialabba, CEO and founder of Music Brokers, Blockchain technology is key to the music industry. It implies a decentralization that will change the entire business making it much more transparent. It happens that in the digital world nobody is sure of the numbers. You can’t check website traffic, or almost anything else. Without going any further, the audit that Elon Musk tried to do on Twitter at the time to have reliable information and to know what he was buying, how many of his users were bots and how many real ones, was a failure. The difficulty in accessing real numbers occurs in all virtual environments. In the near future, this will be completely different thanks to the full implementation of the Blockchain. It will not be long before the transactional currency in the music industry is a digital one. And with it, the music file will be encrypted, which will trigger all payments automatically. As a producer, you will directly receive the payment through an immediate transaction, that is, the risk of “uncollectible” will disappear. And right there, the corresponding payments will also skyrocket for everyone involved: performers, producers, authors, etc. Even taxes, if necessary, for the country where a certain stream is being generated. This will greatly expand the possibilities because the risk that a producer could have when giving his catalog to new entrepreneurs who wanted to launch their own platforms will no longer exist. Even if they did not have technical support to liquidate and guarantee, with these options all administrative matters will be resolved. “Blockchain greatly simplifies access to an industry that has always been very jealous of its content” clarifies Federico Scialabba, president and founder of Music Brokers. “Let’s remember the struggles when Steve Jobs came up with iTunes and the resistance that there was against the possibility of downloading songs separately… 

Now everything is going to be simplified, we can even fantasize, for example, that the telephone companies give away a monthly service with an amount of listeners determined from what each client chooses. And the user could pay only for what he is consuming in an open environment”. It is difficult to predict what will happen, but in any case the outlook is encouraging. Business is definitely going to pick up. And the songs are going to be completely transformed into financial assets because traceability will be really easy. We will be able to see the evolution, the track record, how much each song earns, and all this will also be transparent. 

Federico Scialabba‘s prognosis seems reasonable: “I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point we have a stock market based on songs, or with a set of songs (ETFs), trading daily on the stock market. Then someone will be able to invest in a certain percentage of Let it Be by the Beatles. Today it would be a much more serious investment than all the cryptocurrencies that are pure romanticism, leaps of faith. A song like Let it Be, on the other hand, has a track record since it was released until today. So, you can know how much you’re making, how much you’re going to leave, you can look at industry projections and invest in something that has absolutely solid backing. Investing in an ETF, an exchange-traded fund, that instead of being based on coffee, is based, for example, on the Argentine Trap would be interesting. I would feel much safer with this type of investment. Despite the fact that I know this industry deeply, the data for the evaluation would be much more concrete and predictable. And of course, it is much more fun to invest in music than to invest in oil”. We currently see how various investment funds buy catalogues, they are in fact buying flow because they are works that generate money. Unlike other investments that can pay dividends whether or not they have a good quarter, certain songs pay all the time, all year, every year. The classics pay. And the listening is constantly growing. With the performance of a song in recent years and the number of people joining the system, for free and paid, one could accurately project the evolution. 

According to Federico Scialabba, a great merger between finance and music is coming. The big financial players are getting involved in a new industry for them. Many libraries are being sold at higher prices every day. With Blockchain there will be a lot of precision in how music is consumed and therefore there will be better monetization. For an independent company like Music Brokers, which has been able to build a well-stocked catalog in its 25-year history, the future looks bright. 

Music Brokers
MB Entertainment Group
Federico Scialabba