The bittunes project is about fundamentally changing the way digital music distribution operates on the internet. The project potentially affects both the ‘demand’ and ‘supply’ side of the equation. The initial and most relevant aspect of the project is that it allows people who buy music, (demand side) to earn income by being directly involved in the distribution of digital music.
Technology aspects of the project
The technology behind the Bittunes project will go through a number of stages. The eventual platform will be a P2P based system with dedicated applications able to access the network. There are a number of key technology areas that are important to the success of the project.
- Distributed Computation Systems
- Digital Currency (Bitcoin) Micro Payments
- Recommendation & Discovery Systems
The main aim of Bittunes is to provide the facility for the trading of songs. To support this there is obviously the requirement that users must be able to find songs to buy. The envisioned ways to be able to do this in the initial stage is via top 100’s in various music genres, (categories), and via a song search (such as by genre, artist, territory, language, creation date, etc)
Ranking of tracks in the system
In the early stage of the system, rankings of tracks on the top 100s will be based on qualitative factors, and in a way that is effectively ‘crowd sourced’ by using a 5 star voting better tracks (as judged by members) will rise higher in the top 100 rankings.
When the purchasing and distribution of songs is an established process (with sufficient data available) on the overall system, the ranking tables showing top 100’s will change to include a default display of the ‘most traded’ songs, rather than the most liked. So essentially this means that initially the qualitative measure is displayed, then the quantitative sales measure will take precedence, but it will still be possible to rank the top 100 selling songs in that genre/category by a perceived quality ranking.
Next generation distributed recommendation systems
As we move beyond the 1st stage of the establishment of the system, and particularly the various top 100’s in different genres we will institute our own proprietary crowd-centric recommendation system. This is a very powerful system that is highly social but also highly distributed.
Innovation in digital currency technology (bring on the side chains)
There has been an explosion of activity in the Bitcoin and alt coin field over the last couple of years with the ecosystem effectively forking in numerous directions as developers and entrepreneurs have explored the potential of this new area. We have been excited by the potential of Bitcoin, but also frustrated with aspects of the protocol that did not allow us to do what we wanted to do with respect to micro payments.
However, thanks to the ongoing development of sidechains associated with the main Bitcoin blockchain, we now have the technical processes to enable us to solve these issues and deliver a unique and effective next generation micro payment system.