Bitsong

BitSong is a distributed (open-source) blockchain music ecosystem founded in December 2017, working to develop a decentralized and trustless hub to interconnect the various market players. The company's stated mission is to decentralize the music industry by simplifying the bureaucracy as much as possible for artists, offering those artists a meritocratic and transparent earning model while also offering users a new way to listen to music.

BitSong is not a streaming platform. Instead it is a decentralized ecosystem of services and a community of artists, music providers, and listeners that aims to become the only point of reference within the digital music market. Bitsong intends to offer an NFT music marketplace where users can purchase music as NFTs, and where they can buy, collect, and sell NFT collectibles from preferred artists.

Bitsong's platform is working to be more than a streaming platform, but to offer a decentralized system of services supporting a community of artists, music providers, fans, and investors. This includes a digital music market, a streaming service, and a database for artist metadata to help those artists earn money per stream and to ensure that songs and work are attributed properly.

The metadata system Bitsong is developing is referred to as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed way that is accessible, offering a distributed and immutable system for archiving and accessing the data. This allows the activities of users to be recorded on the blockchain and enable musicians and music providers to create a verifiable, transparent, and immutable ranking. This transparency is intended to reduce the unauthorized use of an artist's music and copyright infringement, to reduce the cost of music piracy.

BTSG is the native token of Bitsong's network, which is used by the governance system to vote on blocks and improvement proposals. The amount of BTSG staked and the duration of the validator's stake defines their voting power on those proposals. BTSG is a bech32 standard token, used for staking, paying fees, and for exchanges between artists and their fans.

Bitsong's system is based on Tendermint/Cosmos-SDK, which relies on validators to secure the network. The role of these validators is to run a full-node and participate in consensus by broadcasting votes that contain cryptographic signatures signed by a private key. These validators validate transactions within the network and receive commissions proportional to voting power.

The Bitsong network includes delegators, who earn based on the voting power they have, which depends on the amount of coins they have staked in the ecosystem. These delegators can receive voting rights by delegating coins to an active validator at a node, or to have a validation node themselves. The earnings of validators and delegators are different. Validators can apply a commission on the earnings that go to the delegators before they are distributed, while they are rewarded for participating in the consensus based on the voting power. If validators do not follow the rules, their delegators will entrust their tokens to other validators, reducing the bad acting validator's voting power. Delegators share both revenue and risk with the validators.