There are lots of areas in which Hive could grow. It ought to be massive in the crypto world instead of people meeting up on centralised corporate platforms. I am a big music fan, so I want to see much more of that here. The mega-acts can have millions of fans elsewhere and can probably earn from that, but if your just have hundreds or thousands of fans then life can be tough. You have to fight and possibly pay to get noticed. Meanwhile, anyone can post on Hive an earn. If an artist brings their fanbase here then both sides stand to gain.
I was discussing this with @thelogicaldude on this post. They were saying that some in the music industry are aware of Hive, but they do not see it as a big enough audience to be interesting. I can see their point as we only have a few thousand people looking at posts. Most of those here want to be a 'content creator' to earn rather than a consumer, but we need both and the content needs to be of a high quality if we want the world to take notice.
There is plenty of music on Hive, but a lot of that is people doing covers. That is fun, but we need that original material here. I do not want to put down efforts like the Vibes contest set up by @lordbutterfly. That has got lots of people posting and earning nice prizes. I know it was set up to attract more musicians to join Hive, but I do not know how much success they have had so far. Prizes of hundreds of dollars ought to be attractive, but then you need to keep them coming back.
A key factor is getting the fans here too and it is up to the artists to bring them in. Others may help to create the accounts for free. Whether this happens may depend on how well they are doing on other platforms. We need them to be including a Hive link on their sites and profiles as well as talking about Hive at shows.
Another project that has driven a lot of music on Hive is @risingstargame that is based around being in the music industry. Lots of musicians are putting their music into the game on the Rising Star Radio as well as selling it as NFTs. I have bought a lot of music that way and some came as physical vinyl from artists like @langvmusic, @double-eagle & @unitedduality, @ravenmus1c, @trentonlundy1, @stickupboys and more. Not all of these people are that active on Hive and that may be due to their fans being elsewhere.
@blocktunes is another project that aims to promote music on the blockchain. They provide services to get it onto the big streaming platforms, so I need to look into that for when I have new music to put out.
@thelogicaldude was saying we need more electronic music artists, but that is not an area I know much about. I know @uwelang is more knowledgeable on that.
My tastes are quite varied and I find a lot to enjoy. Some of the musicians I follow are:
- @thetroublenotes are a band I saw play live in London recently. They do lots of festivals around Europe and have toured in the USA.
- @alex-rourke runs a recording studio in Guatemala.
- @giampaolo19 is a drummer from Italy who has played with some big names and does various session work as well as playing some cool gigs.
- @harbiter is also from Italy where he makes some dark rock.
- @oripenalver drums with an all female rock band in Venezuela.
There have been others who came and went over the years. On the 'legacy blockchain' I think they made some efforts to get some big names to join, but most did not stay for long. That is not so surprising when they may get hardly any comments.
I think we need to do more to get people listening to the music on Hive. We need directories of artists so the listeners can find what they might like. It may be possible to build apps that can emulates some of what Spotify does and they could include ways to support the music with votes. I think there may have been some attempts at this, but I cannot keep up with everything.
We as Hive users need to accept that our own content may not have a mass market, but by supporting the people who could really bring in many more consumers we are building Hive up to be a better platform. If Hive grows then we all benefit.
I know that crypto is going through a rough patch, but Hive has massive potential to do much better than it has been. There are currently hundreds of other crypto projects ranking above it, but how many of them have real use-cases? Hive is for everyone.
I have done posts on this topic before, but we are still not making the progress I would like to see. Am I talking rubbish? I will support the projects and artists I know about and will help out in other ways I can.
If you can recommend some original music on Hive to me then I will give it some support.
Rock on!
