How Can Blockchain Technologies Affect the Entertainment Industry?
Bogdan LashchenkoIntroduction
The entertainment industry is moving forward and lots of people know that this sphere can be called one of those with a lot of money in them. Films, amusement parks, board games, video games, music and other — all of them can be included in the entertainment industry. It can change in the near future if blockchain technologies start infiltrating into the entertainment industry.
Today we will get deeper into the topic and tell how exactly in the future humanity will be interacting with entertainment activities using technologies that are engaged in digital assets.
Main advantages of blockchain
When blockchain technologies are used, it is easier for people to enforce their copyright and protect their art which includes videos, audios or even ordinary paintings that have been around recently.
Thanks to the appearance of non-fungible tokens the majority of digital (and not only) artists from around the globe managed to show their works to the whole world. Some of the works remained unnoticed and other artists were more lucky as their paintings were purchased for a fabulous amount of money. We should remember Everydays: The First 5000 Days by the NFT artist Beeple who sold his work for a record $69,000,000.
Other examples of this kind are different music performers who started to convert their art into NFT. By the way, recently Winamp, a company that put their hand to development of digital audio libraries at the beginning of 2000s, reported about introduction of non-fungible tokens into their player that will help to advance this unusual sphere.
Implementation of blockchain technologies may help both content creators of different kinds and those who want to get the content. The latter demand interesting and high-quality content and major companies find performers that will produce content and compete with their opponents.
2021
2021 was a literal breakthrough for the development of blockchain technologies and NFT culture that may become a foundation of the development of the entertainment sector in the digital dimension. This was the year when people have been able to recover from COVID-19 to an extent, the total capitalization of the cryptocurrency industry exceeded the record $2,600,000,000,000, while recently we have been unable to see the number go higher than $1,000,000,000,000. It is remarkable that at that moment the record was over $700,000,000,000 only from the USA.
Along with development of cryptocurrency activity and non-fungible tokens, big changes have been made in the industry affecting the development of the whole industry of digital assets and the entertainment industry in a way. It entailed not only new opportunities but also new obligations. The more available the content becomes, the faster they want to receive something new and unique.
Now blockchain technologies must turn out helpful as they expand the opportunities of content production and consumption. More and more people are starting to speak about the development of Web3 technologies that have already introduced various changes into the entertainment industry. Decentralization and blockchain will help not only to refine the way we entertain ourselves, but will also give content creators a more fair reward.
Anti copyright violation
One of the problems that can be eliminated by blockchain technology — copyright violation and illegal access to content. According to the analysis of the experts, the US economy loses around $30,000,000,000 on it every year.
New cryptocurrency technologies can establish contact with the content consumer and get information about the user momentarily, see if they have purchased the content (if it can be accessed with a fee) of have decided to use illegal ways. If the rules are violated, the content creator would be able to figure out who is depriving them of earnings and will apply corresponding sanctions.
This control may discourage the desire to get paid content illegally and motivate art creators to demonstrate more inventiveness.
Distribution
Apart from control over content consumption, creators will be able to set specific rules that apply to their creations. For instance, they can attribute properties in a video that will enable downloading the video, placing it on the site and sharing with friends and in other cases you can only share with friends on messengers or only embed it on the site.
Almost all kinds of entertainment industry use a chain where the connection between the art creator and the end user, becoming a mediator as a producer or publisher and others. In other words, a musician is unable to write music, upload it and wake up famous the very next day. There are such cases, but mainly they use producers or music platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Music and others to promote their art типа. Most of such services don’t give musicians a chance to upload their works as they don’t have big names yet so they creators have to address large companies who charge a lot for their service.
It means that musicians obtain only 12% from the total revenue of the music industry of $43,000,000,000. The other part of the money is divided between recording studios, managers, producers, music platforms and other people and companies that help the art to reach the audience.
If blockchain technology enters the music industry, in the future the usage of smart contracts will help musicians to simplify the process of distribution of their art, and the mediators can lose their job. We do not know yet how the music industry will be reshaped and we can only discuss it, however, the potential of the influence of smart contracts and blockchain technologies on the music sphere can be noticed with the unaided eye. Should we say that in this case musicians will be able to have more earnings and will receive big motivation for self-development?
The blockchain technologies can help to automate the process of content distribution and simplify various tasks related to the contacts, licensing and payments. It proves the mentioned hypothesis about removing mediators from creators’ work and helping them to reach the audience. As for payouts, in this case creators got a chance to control their payments and withdrawal of the earnings.
Cryptocurrency gaming
It’s worth noting that at the moment one of the most breakthrough sectors for development of blockchain technologies was the world of NFT games. Many developers have already had time to try themselves in the creation of videogames and some of them have made massive success. The first example that comes to our mind is the project Axie Infinity.
Even though AXS was created several years ago, it became truly successful in 2021 when the cryptocurrency market was at the peak of the bullish cycle. The main feature of the game was the Play2Earn principle. It means that users could not only spend their time with pleasure, but also get pleasant rewards along the way. As we have mentioned in similar materials giving you some facts about this NFT project, many entrepreneurs found people who were ready to play several hours a day and earn money there. It helped to increase passive earnings for the former and gave an interesting and unusual job to the latter.
After the market sank as it had been expected, and it stopped being as profitable at it used to, such collaborations have ended. Nevertheless, Axie Infinity gave us some food for thought and demonstrated that people could earn while playing and entertainment can get on well with blockchain technologies.
Metaverses
We should not forget about the metaverses whose development has been agitated by numerous companies recently. We could also see that building companies start fully-fledged projects in virtual worlds and erect meta-skyscrapers. The main giants in the metaverse sector are The Sandbox, Decentraland. The founder for people’s communication in the virtual world could be called the game Second Life that appeared in 2003, however, it works on the Web2 technology and is not related to blockchain technologies.
According to developers, one of the main goals of metaverses is considered to be using blockchain and welcoming users on the next level of iteration of internet technologies, Web3. Mark Zuckerberg deserved the right to be called the most persistent and desperate supporters of metaverses. The founder of Facebook and multi-billionaire lost loads of billions while chasing his dream trying to highlight his commitment to the idea, he changed the name of his company into Meta. Investors treat it skeptically and lose their money together with Zuckerberg because of the fact that shares of Meta became three times cheaper due to what is happening on the market, but the founder of Facebook insisting on the bright future of metaverses and continue sponsoring Reality Labs that develop Horizon Worlds, a metaverse by Mark Zuckerberg. It may work in the future, however no virtual worlds are at the initial stage of their development.
The main idea of metaverse supporters involves simplification of human interaction with the help of an escape from the real world to virtual universes. They suppose that it will be easier for people to loosen up and get acquainted with people from different places in the world. New dangers can come along with it. For instance, the International Police warns about development of scams based on more advanced technologies. By the way, they created the virtual office in the metaverse as it was made by many other organizations. The French company Renault created an industrial metaverse that will help them to save half of the resources spent on logistics and production issues. Here we can see that metaverses are not only to develop the entertainment industry but also production, however, now we are not going to speak about entertainment anymore.
Takeaway
Summing up everything we have just mentioned, we can make a conclusion that blockchain technologies will help regular users to get new content fast as creators of games, music, painting and other art will not have obstacles in the form of mediators. Thanks to this, the internet will be flooded with entertaining material.
Creators of entertainment content will get numerous advantages. They will not need to worry about distribution, monetization, licensing, copyright and even about the search of the mediator. It is efficient for everyone but not mediators themselves. In the distant future (and maybe not that distant), producers, platforms, distributors and others may hypothetically lost their job.
Bogdan Lashchenko – content manager at EgamersWorld.Bogdan has been working at EGamersWorld since 2023. Joining the company, he began fillin the site with information, news and events.