One thing about the music business is that ownership confers power. Traditionally, labels had control over musicians since they owned the music.
Some companies assist artists in maintaining control over their creative output and autonomously managing their businesses while leveraging technology to communicate with their audience. Online today, we are all creators, yet ownership still carries a lot of weight. But ownership's significance on technological platforms is frequently disregarded.
Every day, social media users share billions of photographs, movies, songs, and other types of media. A copy of the media is copied from the creator's device and pasted to the server of the site disseminating it—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and so forth—when those files are posted.
While uploading may appear like a simple interaction, authors really copy-paste ownership of the file to the platform in addition to the material they are submitting.
I'm referring to the terms of service, which often state that when a file is posted, its ownership is given to the platform for however they choose to monetize it. Platforms can provide distribution or economies of scale that maximize ad-based profits, therefore this has certain benefits. But it's no secret that current revenue strategies don't always serve creators' interests. And this is the crux of the issue. Platforms have benefited disproportionately from owning the content of creators for far too long.
The Ownership Economy, a more general theory that the next generation of internet platforms will be directly created, run, and owned by users, is an alternative avenue that cryptocurrency is opening up in the meanwhile.