Songcoin Aims To Be Music Industry’s Bitcoin

One month after the short-lived CoinYe West cryptocurrency was lawyered out of existence and in the same week that the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange closed amid a theft scandal, US company Pimovi have announced the launch of Songcoin, a new virtual currency for the music industry.

Songcoin will officially launch next week, with a view to lessening transaction fees, offering special promotions for users, and providing alternative monetary incentives for musicians. “The value of alternative currency has been proven by Bitcoin,” said Pimovi co-founder and CTO Kasian Franks.

“We’re looking at providing people with a way to not pay transaction fees, not go through international wires, and a way for people to just kind of have something pretty much alternative to a dollar,” he told Evolver.fm. Franks stressed Songcoin’s exclusivity to the music industry, saying:

“We’re going to make sure that Songcoin has built-in features that cater specifically to musicians and their fans — discounts on certain things that we can build into the currency, and we can control any transaction fee.

“As the stewards of this thing, with a healthy amount of experience with the music industry, we can gear this towards the music industry.”

Franks said that Songcoin will include incentives for music lovers to engage with the currency. “If you use Songcoin to purchase a concert ticket, then we can work with ticket vendors to build in discounts so that if you use Songcoin, you’re going to get a cheaper rate, for example,” he said.

There’s incentives for musicians too, with Frank explaining that a Pimovi-led “music recommendation system” will include “tip jars next to each artist,” which will see to it that “eventually, Songcoin will take on a nice valuation, so Songcoins will be worth more and more.”

“It’s analogous to what happened with Dogecoin. It was kind of a joke currency based on that Doge meme,” said Franks. “The weird thing is…the coins began to take on their own value, because people loved that they could get a hold of these coins that were based on something fun.”

Franks explained to Evolver.fm that if the virtual currency model could result in what is now a “$10 or $20 million” coinbase, based entirely off of a joke, a cryptocurrency “directed at a specific purpose, which no other alternative currency has done before” would naturally be a success.

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