Concordia – A New Future Economy of Music

Abstract

Concordia is a new type of musical instrument, proposed by Johannes Kepler 400 years ago, now being built as an immersive distributed VR protocol to sonify celestial data (or indeed any data structure). Concordia is an instrument of investigation and discovery when users ‘play’ that data structure. But as a distributed open source protocol, Concordia is also an economic experiment: namely a musical instrument as a common pool resource, and a musical instrument as distributed economic infrastructure on a blockchain. We explore the curious economics of Concordia, and some striking implications for the future of the music industry and cultural policy.

Keywords: cryptoeconomics, blockchain, creative industries, smart music, common pool resources

JEL Classification: Z11, O31