A Survey on Blockchain-driven Music Industry: Trends, Gaps, and Future Directions

The music industry is a vast field that has different stakeholders, such as artists, publishers, promoters, etc., for the creation, distribution, promotion, and monetization of music. Blockchains can help the music industry maintain the legal and ethical aspects of music creation, distribution, and incentivization while also preventing frauds owing to their intrinsic security attributes. We oversee various blockchain-driven music industry systems, where we comprehend 11 functions of blockchain-driven music industry perception and inspect them comprehensively towards music industry- and blockchain-linked attributions. We lumped a precursory sample of 89 resources by selecting the reports for filtering benchmarks looked up from E-libraries by applying a descriptive and persistent narrative synthesis-driven quality analysis methodology to identify trends, gaps, strengths, and weaknesses. Founded on the overview, in the blockchain-driven music industry, blockchain can pave the path for blockchain-based musical platforms (D1), decentralized music apps (D2), author attribution, monetization, and royalty payments (D3), preventing ticketing frauds (D4), music recommendation (D5), piracy prevention (D6), digital rights management systems (D7), music supply chain automation (D8), metadata optimization and tracking (D9), disintermediation (D10), and licensing (D11). Comprehensive inspection exposes that in the blockchain-driven music industry, 28.2% draw upon digital rights management (D7), 79.4% draw upon traditional blockchain, and 12.9% draw upon PoS/PoW consensus, drawing the hypothesis that there exists a trend toward reducing third-party reliance and improving revenue transparency and rights for artists. Another hypothesis is that there are gaps such as lack of practical implementation, lack of experimental validation under quantum attacks, and lack of focus for music ticketing fraud prevention, music recommendation, music supply chain automation, and metadata optimization and tracking. At last, we announce the capabilities and adversities to the perception of the blockchain-driven music industry and then contribute propositions to impede them along with future directions to cater to the gaps identified.