Can Emanate Make Money from a Music Cryptocurrency?
Emanate (EMT) hopes to make money from a music cryptocurrency. To that end, Emanate is building a “self-governing music ecosystem on the EOS platform.”
Essentially, Emanate hopes to create a Spotify alternative that will pay musicians instantly for their songs. The payments will be instant feeless transactions made through a global micropayment system.
Moreover, Emanate boasts it can offer transactions with no “currency conversion issues.” Beyond that Emanate claims to offer an API/SDK for artificial intelligence (AI) interactions and virtual reality (VR) integration. To elaborate, SDK stands for software development kind and an API is an application programming interface.
Emanate collaborates with Vampr
Impressively, Emanate claims over 500,000 music industry participants have access to its platform through the Vampr music-social media app.
They designed Vampr to help fans discover music, connect fans with other fans, and to help fans and musicians collaborate. On 17 June 2019, Vampr claimed that its users had made 24.484 million swipes and 4.136 million connections in 199 countries.
Interestingly, Emanate is trying to connect with real users in the real world before its initial coin offering (ICO). Notably, Emanate entered into the partnership with Emanate before the ICO. Thus, Emanate’s team could be more interested in building a business and making money than selling coins.
How Emanate brings Smart Contracts to Music
Consequently, Emanate claims any developer can build apps to sell Emanate songs through platforms or games. In addition, Emanate claims it will pay claims for their songs.
Finally, Emanate claims it can offer risk-free collaborations by using smart contracts. To explain, a smart contract is a digital construct built into a cryptocurrency or blockchain platform.
BlockChain Hub describes a smart contract “as a computer code running on top of a blockchain containing a set of rules under which the parties to that smart contract agree to interact with each other. If and when the pre-defined rules are met, the agreement is automatically enforced.”
Theoretically, a smart contract will automatically perform actions such as payment. Thus, smart contracts will control all transactions on Emanate. The hope is that the smart contracts will automatically pay performers the royalties. Plus, smart contracts could theoretically protect creators’ ownership rights.
Emanate is trying to achieve these goals with a public blockchain network built with EOSIO. EOSIO is the Ethereum alternative developed by Block.one, they associate with the EOS (EOS) cryptocurrency. In fact, EOS is a smart contract platform Block.One built as a more flexible and scalable alternative to Ethereum.
Is Emanate Scalable?
EOS’s big advantage over Ethereum is that its blockchain is theoretically more scalable than Ethereum’s blockchain. To clarify, being scalable means that a blockchain is bigger, faster, and capable of handling more transactions.
To reach millions of fans all over the world and make money, Emanate will need a scalable platform. Currently, EOS is partially scalable, the EOS Network Monitor estimated EOS was handling 47 to 58 transactions a second (TPS) on 17 June 2019. Plus, the Monitor claims EOS has handled up to 3,996 TPS in the past.
In contrast, Cointelegraph estimates Bitcoin (BTC) could only handle seven TPS and Ethereum (ETH) could only handle 15 TPS on 22 January 2019. Consequently, a Bitcoin music platform could crash it handles over seven TPS. Additionally, an Ethereum music platform could crash if it handles over 20 TPS.
However, Cointelegrpah claims Ripple (XRP), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and Litecoin (LTC) can handle more transactions per second than EOS. In detail, Cointelegraph estimates Ripple handled 1,500 TPS, Bitcoin Cash handled 61 TPS and Litecoin handled 54 TPS on 22 January 2019.
When Will Emanate Go Live?
Thus, Emanate could be scalable which can help the blockchain platform compete with Spotify.
However, Emanate’s platform is not yet available. Instead, Emanate plans an alpha test in 2nd Quarter 2019, and partner platform integration in 4th Quarter 2019. Moreover, Emanate plans no Beta Testing until 3rd Quarter 2020, and a commercial release may not occur until after 2020, Emanate admits.
Therefore, Emanate has no working product or platform. Instead, all Emanate has is an idea for a product it is trying to make a reality. However, Emanate wants to enter a lucrative business.
Could Emanate Make Money?
Global recorded music sales rose to $19.1 billion in 2018, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimates. Moreover, international recorded sales grew by 9.7% in 2018.
Importantly, most of the global music industry’s 2018 revenues ($11.2 billion) came from digital tunes, Forbes contributor Hugh McIntyre estimates. Additionally, McIntyre estimates digital music sales grew by over 21% in 2018.
Therefore, nearly 59% of the music transactions are digital, McIntyre concludes. Plus, 34% of music industry transactions in 2018 were streaming songs. Importantly, streaming generated revenues of $9 billion in 2018. Finally, paid music downloads grew by 21.2% in 2018 but they only composed 7.7% of global music revenues.
Thus, Emanate is entering a huge market where tens of millions of people are ordering and paying for a digital product: music. On the other hand, Emanate will face vast amounts of competition including Spotify (NYSE: SPOT) and Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL).
Does Spotify Make Money?
It is possible to generate a lot of revenue but hard to make money with digital music, Spotify demonstrates.
Spotify recorded revenues of $6.045 billion and a gross profit of $4.49 billion 2019. Meanwhile, Spotify stock was trading at $149.63 a share on 17 June 2019. That gave Spotify a market cap of $27.019 billion on that day.
However, Spotify lost money in 2018. In fact, Stockrow gives Spotify a -$49.43 million operating loss and a net loss of $-89.66 million in 2018. Yet, Spotify’s revenues grew at a rate of 23.11% in 2019.
Meanwhile, Spotify claimed to have 217 million active monthly users and over 100 million paying users for its Spotify premium in April 2019, The Verge estimates. If true, those numbers make Spotify the largest digital music provider in the world. In contrast, Apple Music around 50 million paid users worldwide in April 2019, The Wall Street Journal calculates.
India shows digital music services can grow fast. The Verge claims over two million Indians joined Spotify between February and April 2019. Interestingly, Spotify only entered the Indian market in February 2019.
Is Emanate a good cryptocurrency?
I like Emanate (EMT) because its creators have a good business plan and are using the latest technology. However, Emanate is a totally unproven concept.
Strangely, CoinmarketCap gives Emanate some value with a Coin Price of 4.27₵ and a 24-Hour Market Volume of $34,113 on 17 June 2019. However, Coinmarketcap does not give Emanate a Market Capitalization. Additionally, there was a total supply of 208 million EMT on 17 June 2019.
Meanwhile, Bancor gave EMT a Coin Price of 4.4₵ and a liquidity depth of $8,196 on 17 June 2019. To clarify, the liquidity depth is the estimated buying power of all the EMT in the market.
Moreover, Emanate is participating in Bancor’s Liquidity Network which makes conversion to Ethereum easy. Such conversion is important because most blockchain platforms use Ethereum tokens.
In the final analysis, I think Emanate (EMT) is a token to watch because digital music is a proven lucrative business. However, Spotify shows making money in music is tough, so I advise speculators to watch Emanate but not to buy it.
