Bitsong: the blockchain built for Music

The music business has never moved faster and yet, for most of the people who actually make the music, it rarely feels like progress. Songs travel the world in seconds; royalties crawl for months. Audiences are bigger than ever; artist margins are thinner than ever. A handful of platforms set the terms, tune the algorithms, and press an invisible thumb on who gets heard and who gets paid.

That imbalance is exactly where Web3 has something meaningful to say, not as a buzzword bolted onto old habits, but as a different architecture for value, rights, and relationships.

BitSong is one of the few blockchain projects built specifically for this problem space, and that focus matters. It’s a Cosmos-based, application-specific chain designed to give artists, labels, and fans shared rails for distribution, payments, ownership, and community.

What is Bitsong?

At its core, BitSong is a decentralized music streaming and distribution platform built on its own application-specific blockchain within the Cosmos ecosystem. It functions as an open, alternative infrastructure for the music industry, designed to directly connect artists and their fans while removing traditional intermediaries.

By leveraging blockchain technology, BitSong enables transparent royalty payments, true digital ownership of music assets via NFTs, and programmable fan engagement through tokens and memberships.

It’s not merely an app on a generic blockchain but a sovereign, music-native environment where the entire lifecycle of a release, from funding and distribution to community building and monetization, can occur on-chain, governed by the artists and the community that supports them.

Distribution without gatekeeping

Why Bitsong matters

If you trace the typical life of a song in the traditional music industry, you run into friction at every stage: rights that live in siloed databases, splits that are opaque, payouts that batch on platform timetables, and discovery systems that reward the platform’s goals first and creative goals second.

The music industry, while a global powerhouse generating over $25 billion annually (IFPI Global Music Report 2024), is plagued by inefficiencies and inequities.

Artists often receive as little as 12% of revenue from their work, with streaming platforms, record labels, and other intermediaries taking the lion’s share (Citigroup, 2018). Royalty payments can take months or even years to reach creators, and opaque accounting practices leave many artists in the dark about their earnings.

Producers, songwriters, and other contributors face similar challenges, while fans have little say in the creative process or direct connection with their favorite artists.

This outdated model stifles creativity and limits opportunities for emerging talent.

BitSong is aiming to eliminate intermediaries, streamlines bureaucracy, and puts power back into the hands of creators and their communities.

The distribution of compensation within the modern music industry remains notoriously opaque, centralized, and disadvantageous for the vast majority of creators.

Royalty flows are shrouded in complexity, with payments fragmented across multiple siloed platforms, streaming services, digital stores, and collecting societies: each operating with its own proprietary reporting systems and delayed payment cycles, often taking months or even years to trickle down.

This centralized model, governed by a handful of powerful intermediaries, siphons off a significant portion of the revenue, leaving artists with meager margins despite generating massive cultural value.

The result is a system where the success of a song on a global scale does not proportionally translate into financial sustainability for the artists and songwriters who brought it to life, creating a fundamental power and economic imbalance that stifles creativity.

Turning fans into stakeholders

BitSong redefines the artist-fan relationship by transforming passive listeners into active participants.

Through FanTokens, fans can support their favorite artists by purchasing tokens that grant access to exclusive perks, such as early track releases, virtual meet-and-greets, or voting rights on creative decisions like album artwork or tour locations. Music NFTs take this further, allowing fans to own a piece of their favorite songs or albums, sometimes even sharing in streaming royalties.

For instance, a fan could buy a Music NFT for an artist’s new single, gaining access to a private live stream performance and a small percentage of the song’s streaming revenue.

This not only deepens fan engagement but also creates a new revenue model where fans invest in artists they believe in, fostering a sense of community and shared success.

Bitveil’s role in BitSong

Instant payments without threshold

One of the biggest frustrations for indie artists on platforms like Spotify is the payment threshold. On Spotify, artists must reach a minimum earnings threshold (typically $100 or more, depending on the distributor) before they can withdraw their royalties, which can take months to accumulate, especially for smaller artists.

This delay can be a significant barrier for indie musicians relying on every dollar to fund their next project. In contrast, BitSong allows artists to withdraw any amount, at any time, thanks to its blockchain-based smart contracts.

Whether you’ve earned $1 or $1,000 from streams or NFT sales, you can access your funds instantly, giving indie artists the financial flexibility to keep creating without waiting for arbitrary thresholds.

At Bitveil, we didn’t stumble into the BitSong ecosystem. We chose it because it aligns with how we think creative economies should be built: on specialized infrastructure, with governance that rewards contribution, and with enough flexibility to plug into the wider Cosmos.

We operate a BitSong validator and we’re also one of the five members of the BitSong Delegation DAO, contributing to how stake is allocated and how community programs are shaped.

Looking ahead, we’re supporting BitSong’s growth, telling better stories to artists who are tired of being told their music is “content,” and about giving fans usable on-ramps into a culture that values their participation.

If our work resonates, support us by delegating your BTSG to the Bitveil validator.