entertainment & lifestyle · music industry
ExploringMusic Industry
Zambian music is made, toured and streamed. The part that decides whether a song earns anything is the least glamorous and the most broken — registration, rights, splits and the paperwork nobody has time for.
Photo: TStudio_lv on Unsplash
Projects
Music
Learning and practice for musicians.
What we'd build
Four ideas, in the order we would test them. None are built.
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01
Releasing without a middleman
One place to get a finished track live and keep it there — metadata entered once, stored properly, and not lost the next time a platform changes its form.
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02
Splits and rights people can check
Who wrote it, who owns it, who gets what — recorded in a form an artist can read and verify, rather than a chain of messages and a lost folder.
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03
Royalties that add up
The boring, essential question of what actually arrived from a stream or a show, and which platform is responsible for it. Most artists currently cannot answer this at all.
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04
Rehearsal and studio on a phone
Setlists, recording takes, and the logistics of getting people into the same room — built for a home studio and a feature phone, not a professional facility.
Where it stands
Exploring
Desk research and early conversations with artists and the people who book them. Nothing is built. The first question we need answered is which single piece of that paperwork actually costs an artist money today.
Recording societies and collection bodies already do part of this job properly. Anything we would build has to sit alongside them rather than quietly replace them.