Alizee began by explaining the concept of the creator economy, which encompasses independent workers such as content creators, community builders, and curators. With the explosive growth of the NFT market, reaching trading volumes of $25 billion in 2022, blockchain has emerged as the perfect place for the creator economy. The key advantage lies in its ability to disintermediate, reducing the number of intermediaries between creators and consumers. This disintermediation opens up new possibilities for monetization and direct engagement with the community.

Through smart contracts and decentralized marketplaces, creators can tokenize their work as NFTs and trade them directly with their audience. This allows for the monetization of creative output like never before. Additionally, the integration of utility into NFTs enables creators to engage with their audience on a more granular level. Alizee provided an example of music artists who can use NFTs to invite specific groups of fans to exclusive backstage events and offer unique merchandise. These interactions can occur without the need for third-party permission, providing unprecedented opportunities for artists to connect with their audience.

Alizee emphasized the potential of music rights management as a compelling use case for blockchain technology. She highlighted the complexities of the traditional value chain, involving artists, songwriters, record labels, publishers, distributors, streaming platforms, and royalty organizations (PROs). This convoluted process often leads to significant time delays and results in less than 20% of revenue reaching the original artists and songwriters.

With Web3 and blockchain technology, the value chain can be streamlined and simplified. Creators can interact with blockchain-based platforms that enable them to manage copyrights directly through smart contracts. Casper's CEP-78 token standard offers enhanced NFT functionality to facilitate this process. The smart contract automatically handles royalty collection and distribution, allowing for near real-time micro-payments to independent artists.

Web3 technologies, like NFTs and smart contracts, harbor tremendous potential to reshape and disrupt the conventional music industry model, creating innovative pathways for artists to earn revenue and distribute their work. To comprehend this, let's first understand the traditional model.

Historically, artists have been heavily reliant on music labels and distribution companies to sell their music. These intermediaries often take a significant chunk of the revenue, leaving artists with a smaller portion of the sales proceeds. This model has long been criticized for favoring middlemen over the creators themselves.

Now, let's explore how emerging blockchain technologies like NFTs and smart contracts could offer a novel approach. NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are unique digital assets on the blockchain. They can represent ownership of a specific item or piece of content, such as a music track. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into code, and they can automatically manage and distribute assets according to those terms.

Smart contracts on the Casper blockchain have the potential to revolutionize the music industry by allowing artists to automate distribution and allocate revenue in a much more flexible and fair way. For instance, artists could deploy their own smart contracts that enable them to retain all the revenue from their sales, bypassing traditional middlemen.

Moreover, these smart contracts could introduce innovative models that allow fans and collectors to actively participate in the distribution and revenue sharing. For example, an artist could issue an NFT for a new song and include a smart contract that shares a portion of the revenue from each subsequent sale of that NFT with the current holder. This not only provides an additional incentive for fans to support their favorite artists but also allows them to share in the artist's success.

Furthermore, the multi-account ownership or multi-signature features on-chain with Casper can contribute to this disruptive model. Multi-signature refers to the requirement of multiple parties to sign off on transactions, adding an extra layer of security and consent. This could be used, for instance, in a band scenario where all members need to agree before a song is sold or royalties are distributed.

In sum, Web3 technologies, NFTs, and smart contracts, especially on platforms like Casper, have the potential to create groundbreaking new models that democratize the music industry, allowing artists to maintain more control over their work and revenue, and enabling fans to become active participants in the music distribution process.

Alizee stressed that the emergence of a new economy centered around creators relies on innovative token standards. Casper's CEP 78 token standard gives creators built-in control over their NFTs' behavior. Key features include different ownership modes (such as soul-bound and transferable), burnable NFTs, and mutable metadata. These flexible settings enable creators to define their NFTs' characteristics according to their specific needs and business models.

Thanks to Casper’s enhanced NFT standard- CEP 78, creators can gain more control over token behavior. This is achieved via modalities, which are simply pre-defined NFT settings.

• Minter Mode: Ownership of the NFT is attributed to the minter and cannot be transferred.
• Assigned Mode: The minter specifies the owner of the NFT, and ownership cannot be changed or transferred.
• Transferable Mode: The minter specifies the owner of the NFT, and ownership can be transferred to another entity.

These three modalities provide flexibility in determining the ownership and transferability characteristics of NFTs, catering to different use cases and preferences within the Casper ecosystem.

Check out our GitHub to learn more about CEP 78.

Join the Casper Ecosystem

Alizee concluded her speech by inviting developers to join the Casper ecosystem. Our new Developer Portal is an excellent starting point for any developer that is interested in building on Casper and taking advantage of the CEP 78 standard.  Additionally, the Casper Accelerate Grant program provides funding opportunities for developers and project founders to build on Casper and contribute to the growth of the creator economy on Casper. You can learn more about the Casper Accelerate Grant Program here.

Alizee’s speech at the Blockchain Economy Istanbul Summit shed light on the transformative potential of Casper NFTs and blockchain technology in revolutionizing music rights management within the Creator economy. Casper enables independent artists to take control of their monetization and engagement strategies, while significantly reducing the complexities and inefficiencies of the traditional music industry value chain. With transparent royalty allocation, near real-time micro-payments, and direct community engagement, Casper is empowering artists and creating new opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and financial success. Developers and creators are encouraged to explore Casper's ecosystem, utilize the CEP 78 token standard, and contribute to the growth of the creator economy on the Casper blockchain.

By embracing this new paradigm, we can look forward to a future where creators have greater agency, transparency, and financial rewards for their artistry, ushering in a vibrant and thriving Creator economy.