This ten-year content industry infrastructure company is actually an invisible Web3 pioneer
In the past year, with the explosion of the concept of Web3, a business paradigm upgrade around the "traditional Internet" has also quietly started.
Among the many tracks, the content industry has become a pioneer track for this round of major upgrades due to its low offline dependence, large bilateral market, and urgent demand for redistribution of rights and interests. From Mirror, which focuses on the sovereignty of text content, to Superare, which focuses on the field of artworks, to Livepeer, which hopes to reshape the streaming service landscape, and even the more general decentralized domain name ENS, many content industry projects originally born in the Web3 era are Significant development has been achieved in the past year.
In addition to these original content industry projects in the Web3 era, a large number of Web2 "traditional giants" such as Meta, Universal Music, Netflix, Christie's, Line, and Visual China have also stepped down to explore whether they can be developed under the new Internet narrative. Find new business opportunities.
Looking around at these projects or companies that regard Web3 as the key to the next era, although each has different starting points, business models, content categories, target groups, etc., they all describe the same vision in the narrative——Open up the closed loop of value transfer from creation to consumption in a fair and open way, and build an open, symbiotic and sustainable content industry ecology.
Fairness, openness, symbiosis... It is not the first time we have seen the binding of these keywords to the content industry.
When tracking and reporting potential companies in the Internet industry in various fields, we came into contact with a content industry infrastructure company called "Seeing Music". The foundation (non-chain settlement), builds a mutually beneficial value transfer system for creators and institutions, developers, content demanders and other roles in the entire music industry chain.
The layout has been ten years? See Web3 through the eyes of music
Coinciding with the 10th anniversary of the establishment of Seemusic, with the help of the Web3 concept, Odaily recently contacted Seemusic again. When we heard the word Web3, Seemusic said to us:"We were founded ten years ago because of this, but now we have new terminology, and there will be other names in the future, but the evolution of the Internet will definitely change from the pursuit of efficiency to the pursuit of fairness, and it is inevitable to start the innovation of production relations. "
As the music industry infrastructure company that currently ranks first in China and has the largest music asset scale in Asia, Saw Music has realized the full-link digital capabilities of creation, protection, distribution, management, and commercial application, carrying more than 1 million Global creators, docking with the assets of more than a thousand demand organizations including Spotify, Youtube, Douyin, Netease Cloud, etc., covering 95% of music consumption channels and more than 30 music demand scenarios, and now there are more than 20 million music Digital assets circulate in the system.
Such a ten-year-old Internet company is doing Web3? It sounds a bit fragmented, but with the in-depth communication with Jianmusic, we also gradually understood the company's understanding of the spirit of Web3 (including the dismantling for trade-offs), and also understood the Web3 road it wants to take. what is it.
As seen in the music complaint, the company positions itself as a Web3 capability provider and supports other participants in the ecosystem with a digital operating structure.Really return data ownership to creators and users.
Since its establishment in 2012, see music has started from focusing on the construction of efficient bilateral transaction infrastructure between upstream creators and downstream users; after ten years of evolution, it has further expanded the chain of derivative functions, such as copyright protection, storage, interface, transmission , Store building, website building SAAS, PAAS and so on.
In the development process of the past ten years, Saw Music has been implicitly implementing the concept of "openness and equal rights". On the creator's side, we see that music has never played the role of producing music since its inception, but through an open platform that allows creators to freely upload and distribute various original music works. The copyright and absolute rights of these works Most of the relevant economic interests are not owned by Seemusic, but are fully controlled by the creators; on the user side, Seemusic treats all channels equally, and will not have unique advantages due to certain channels (such as traffic ) and "stand in line", whether it is the demand for flexible, large-scale, on-demand calls to global music digital assets, or the needs for quick adoption and use, they can be called through infrastructure with global equal rights, high efficiency, and low loss.
Today, ten years later, just as the spring breeze of Web3 begins to blow, seeing music gradually and explicitly introduce the concept of "symbiosis" into the ecology. In the operation of the entire industrial ecology, seeing music will not be "all-inclusive", but will continue to release revenue-generating services, and at the same time integrate contributors who have been neglected in the digitalization of the industrial chain in the past into the ecology, so that the ecology More participants in the ecosystem gain consensus and benefits in the ecology by virtue of their contributions, and promote the innovation of production relations in the digital content ecology.
Of course, seeing music as the underlying platform, revenue will be extracted in the form of Gas Fee, but this part of the revenue will eventually be fed back to the system indirectly through the improvement of infrastructure, and finally build a self-operating, value-based platform with all roles. Circulation, co-creation and shared open ecology.
"Openness, equal rights, and co-existence" is Seemusic's understanding of the core concepts of Web3, and the development of the past ten years is Seemusic's answer sheet based on this understanding.
Does the bottom layer need to be decentralized? Seeing the giving and receiving of music
In the previous article, we sold a pass—seeing that the music dismantled the spirit of Web3 in order to make a trade-off. The "trade-off" emphasized here refers to seeing that music does not use a decentralized blockchain on the settlement layer, but chooses a centralized server, and does not use token or NFT as a medium in business operations.
This is also the biggest point of difference between us and Seeing Music. As a reporter who has followed and reported on crypto and Web3 for a long time, I am well aware of the advantages of adopting a decentralized bottom layer, and I firmly believe that this is the general trend in the future, but seeing the explanation made by music from the perspective of a mature commercial company still makes me fall into a dilemma. Contemplation, this is also worthy of further thinking by all Web3 practitioners.
When talking about the reason for such a choice, Seeing Music said that there are not only policy reasons, but also considerations at the level of operation and development stages.Although the decentralized on-chain ecology has achieved breakthrough development in the past one or two years, at present, the performance of the blockchain is still limited, and the related infrastructure is not perfect. Can it carry commercial-level business operations? It has not been fully tested. For an enterprise that needs to operate forward and continue to invest in construction, centralized services can help them more flexibly and efficiently handle various events in real business scenarios.
I personally agree with this point. Most of the most common application categories on the chain in the past two years are "finite state applications" represented by DeFi, which is characterized by deriving all transactions only by verifying the balance change of the address Logic, but for commercial scenarios in the music and other content industries, related transactions will involve state changes other than a large number of balance changes. This is the "infinite state application" we often refer to when talking about Web3. The smooth operation of the application will not only have higher requirements on the performance of the blockchain itself, but also rely on the further development of related infrastructure such as storage services.
Seeing Music further introduced that, not to mention the digitization of the entire content industry, there are many challenges that outsiders cannot imagine in the actual operation of music content alone. Each right party, such as the master tape producer, sound mixer, arranger, etc., traces back the attribution of the rights they should enjoy one by one; further, how to apply these rights to multi-dimensional rich and growing consumption scenarios (advertising, K song , soundtrack, sports, etc.); and how to protect emerging rights faster and more standardizedly after the relevant laws and regulations are updated, and ensure that the corresponding benefits can be distributed fairly and openly to all rights holders; in the continuous development of the technological environment How to authorize the rights of the content to more diverse subdivisions and channels (the reality is that most demanders do not understand, accept or cannot use blockchain, token, NFT)... These are all It is a problem that enterprises will encounter in the actual operation day after day. It is difficult to get a desired answer when evaluating the carrying capacity of the blockchain at the current stage.
Judging by seeing the music, most of the Web3 projects emerging in batches at this stage are still on the concept level, and the scale of a small number of landing projects has not been expanded for the time being. Most of these projects are still in a relatively early stage, and they are not bad. The challenges mentioned above need to be faced, but the time has not yet come. On the contrary, for Seemusic, which has a history of ten years, experience tells them that if they want to break through the fierce market competition, they must not be tied down in any aspect.
However, this does not mean that seeing music is denying the future of the blockchain. Although it has no intention of fully shifting to the blockchain for the time being, it has done a detailed research on the technical difficulty and cost of service migration. In this regard, the company also stated: "It is a cross-border Multi-chain, consortium chain, or public chain, sharing and evolution of decision-making mechanisms, etc., are all timing issues rather than technical issues, and the ecological scale built by circulation, collaboration efficiency, and fairness can lead from the start.”
The road to Web3 with different routes leading to the same goal
Based on the above, we can roughly conclude that the vision of music is highly consistent with those Web3 content industry projects that have emerged in batches recently. They all hope to open up the closed loop of music value transfer from creation to consumption in a fair and open way, and build a An open, equal rights, and symbiotic content industry ecology. The difference is that due to considerations of compliance, operation and its own development stage, Saw Music currently does not use blockchain as the service settlement layer, but uses a centralized server. At the same time, not using tokens also avoids speculative and price fluctuation risks to a certain extent.
With the further popularization of the Web3 concept, in the new industry upgrading competition, in addition to paying attention to those original content industry projects in the Web3 era, we cannot ignore the music that is coming from another direction.
As the first batch of companies in the "traditional" Internet field to awaken Web3 awareness, they have seen that Music has a deep understanding of the core concepts of Web3 such as "openness, equal rights, and symbiosis" and a clear plan for implementation. It has long been committed to the production of content assets. And operation provides the underlying infrastructure and innovation environment. At the same time, Seeing Music also has operational experience and industrial resource advantages that emerging projects do not have, such as perfect rights confirmation and rights protection schemes, a mature rights and interests circulation system, a large group of creators, and rich demand channels (Spotify .
In the new race of Web3.0, whoever is ready to start first may be the maker of the rules of the game, the creator of the ecosystem, and the owner of the innovation dividend. Considering that the vast majority of activities in the current content industry chain still take place In Web2, taking a comprehensive look, music will occupy a considerable status advantage for a long time.
Two roads in different directions, but both lead to Web3, it is not yet known who will reach the end first.
