Trance artist Gareth Emery recently shared a screenshot of an e-mail from a “big radio promoter” that pigeonholes the artist and degrades his music and fans. The e-mail shows how the promoter labels Gareth Emery as an artist known for “druggy rave music” and that’s the formula he should stick with if he wants to have a successful career.
Choon is a music streaming service and digital payments ecosystem powered by the Ethereum blockchain and designed to solve some of the music industry’s most fundamental problems.
A venture co-founded by partners Gareth Emery, John Watkinson, Bjorn Niclas, and Matt Hall, Choon is set to be launched next year. While it is considered a music startup, it also has a clear component in financial technology since it aims to try solving many of the issues many artists have right now with streaming services utilizing cryptocurrency-based solutions.
Choon will be built on the Ethereum blockchain, something Emery says he has been enthusiastic about since 2013. In addition, the service will have its own payment token called âNOTESâ and a feature called âSmart Record Contracts,â which would presumably help create more effective contracts and, according to Choon, replace many of the procedures for licensing and contracting at present.
Choon promises to distribute half of the total overall NOTES token supply directly to artists over the next five years through a system called streaming for mining, plus an ambitious 80% returns for artists from streaming packages revenues, higher than the standard 70%, which has been decreasing as per recent negotiations with major labels by companies such as Spotify. While it may be seen as a concern, many contend that the real problem lies in where the money is going. Labels, distributors, publishers, artists are splitting up majority of the revenues, while the writers, engineers and producers get the scraps . Also many of the contracts are so opaque and complicated it is hard to know if one is being paid fairly.
We sat down with co-founder Bjorn Niclas to learn more about Choon and its Beta launch.
It is no secret that DJ polls aren’t regarded with much authenticity in this day and age. With the explosion of EDM and the advent of the digital age, the once respected DJ Mag Top 100 poll began to be considered as more of a popularity contest, before rumors corruption, paid advertisement and underhanded voting tactics on behalf of some of the biggest EDM artists in the scene began to surface.
DJs and their teams have been spending tens of thousands of dollars to activate marketing campaigns encouraging fans to vote in the poll. Other artists have gotten, and possibly paid, non-music celebrities (such as Bollywood acts and actresses) to ask their fans to vote for a specific DJ. Then various witnesses revealed how Dimitri Vegas & Like Mike were having “good looking girls” walk around Tomorrowland in their home country of Belgium asking attendees to vote for the duo on iPads.
Trance and progressive house producers Ashley Wallbridge and Gareth Emery recently teamed up to launch parody DJ duo CVNT5 in an attempt to shed light on the tactics used by some artists to gain popularity and votes in the DJ Mag Top 100 poll. They just released a video that sees CVNT5 attempt to win the title of the poll, announcing  $50k investment on advertising space to boost votes. The rest of the hilarious video depicts other tactics used to score high on the contest, including paying black market companies to generate votes, bribing key figures, and using gimmicks to gain popularity, such as wearing costumes while performing. Watch the video in full below.
