The best business model pre-internet was to charge for content. In the internet age, I think the rest of the world will become more like video games — give away the base layer, and let the internet do its thing, supercharging viral marketing to monetize the complement.

The whole music industry is something like $20B. Compare it to video games, a $140B market, and you see the discrepancy. Fortnite alone makes $3B a year, and most of it is profit. Same with League of Legends — they make $2B a year, mainly selling virtual goods.

The joint stock corporation expanded the group of people who had financial upside from just founders to founders and employees. Crypto networks will expand this from founders and employees to founders, employees, and users.

Music has just as much engagement as video games; there’s basically no reason there should be a 7x difference in market size — except for the business model.

-Second, it allows customers to also be investors, sharing in the financial upside of their favorite creator.

The ownership economy is correcting for the gaps the LLC created, reviving the concept of co-ops and making it sustainable.

The ownership economy thesis is that value in past web platforms — Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Peer-to-peer networks/marketplaces, etc — is generated by users who never retain any of it. Users contribute value, but they don’t capture it.

Many issues people have with social networks and technology arise from a mismatch between the nature of these networks and the legacy corporate structures that govern them.

Crypto enables new ways for musicians (and other creators) to directly capture the value they create in a couple key ways: