Creator Economy in the Music Industry

Creator Economy in the Music Industry
Introduction
As the largest construct of information, the World Wide Web (WWW) has witnessed a significant progress since its early days of Web 1.0 to today’s Web 4.0 (Aghaei, 2012). According to Aghaei (2012), Web 1.0 served to connect information, Web 2.0 connected people, Web 3.0 offered knowledge connections, while Web 4.0 has emerged to connect intelligence. Web 4.0 may be conceived as the Internet of things or a web of intelligent connections (Borah, 2015). Web development and related technologies emerged in the late 1989 when Tim Berners-Lee viewed the capabilities of the WWW as powered by three innovations and phases: Web 1.0 or web of documents, Web 2.0 or web of people, and Web 3.0, also known as web of data. In his proposal, Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist and former employee at CERN presented a proposal for a concept that would eventually become the modern WWW. While the 1989 proposal was intended to provide CERN with an effective system of communication, it became a worldwide adoption with the introduction of hypertext in 1990 by Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau (Choudhury, 2014). Hypertext became the standard of connecting or linking and enabling access to information of different formats as a web of nodes that users can browse at their will. Since these early days, web development has evolved from simple connection of documents to data-centric generation of the web. Between Web 1.0 and Web 3.0, users have shifted from watching/reading to creating, and owning content. In the music industry, Web 3.0 has become a platform where creators such as writers, lyricists, and artists can take full ownership of their content from oppressive oligarchs and directly earn revenues from their creative art through contracts and tokens (Gate.io, 2022). This paper explores the evolution of web development and its impact of on the creator economy in the music industry.
From Web 1.0 to Web 4.0
Web 1.0 lasted between 1989 and 2005 and only served as an information connection. Berners-Lee, the investor of the WWW first considered the web as “read-only” and during its infancy, the web offered little interaction where users could exchange information among them without interacting with the web. The first generation was named “read-only web” because people could only view or read information published on the web pages (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). The pages were also static, meaning that they could not change frequently as witnessed today. Service providers and content creators began publishing online catalogues to advertise products and services for online users to view. Since users could not interact with web pages in Web 1.0, “Push Model” served to disseminate information to customers (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). This first generation of the web served as an information space where resources were identified using global identifiers known as the Uniform Resources Identifiers (URIs) (Choudhury, 2014). This generation comprised of static pages aimed to deliver content and nothing more than searching for information and reading it without contributing or reacting to the content or interacting with it. Web 1.0 allowed people to move from offline to online searches and order products and services, but could not interact or give their contributions in terms of content creation. The technology that powered Web 1.0 was Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and used the basic protocol of communication known as Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
The second generation or Web 2.0, or “Wisdom Web” emerged in 2004 as a “read-write” standard and users were able to collaborate and share information on the Internet. Other term attributed to Web 2.0 are participative Web and “People-Centric Web (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016).” Dale Dougherty conceived the concept following a brainstorming session in a conference hosted by the MediaLive International and O’Reilly (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). From this conference, Web 2.0 was born to facilitate collaboration, participation, and distribution of content among both formal and informal actors. The introduction of Web 2.0 was a shift from the traditional model of making content available online for consumption to a more participatory and dynamic model where web developers were able to update media-rich pages as frequent as they wished. Besides, information began to flow between content creators and consumers. For instance, developers could measure user participation by examining the volume of comments while consumers could check the relative popularity of a website by referring to hit counters. Web 2.0 also marked an era of user-generated content (UGC) and rich social media interaction. Other capabilities that came alongside Web 2.0 include picture and video sharing, blogging, mashups, weblogs, hosted service, chatting, web applications, emails and instant messaging (IM), voice over IP (VoIP), podcasting, social bookmarking, and folksonomies. With newer technologies such as Extensible HTML (XHTML), XSL Transformations (XSLT)/XML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Ajax, JavaScript, Document Object Model (DOM), and Adobe Flash, social media sites mushroomed. These platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr helped to connect people in ways unimaginable before (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). However, in Web 2.0, users have more participation and interaction, but with less control.
In 2006, John Markoff from the New York Times first coined the term Web 3.0 as the third generation or “executable web” that would address the limitations of Web 2.0. In his conception, Markoff thought of Web 3.0 as a model that would define structural data and connect them to facilitate discovery, integration, automation, and reuse across different applications. Web 3.0 or “semantic web” aimed to reduce human tasks and decision-making and transfer them to machines with machine-readable content (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). The semantric Web became an efficient way of representing data on the Web as a globally linked database using machine-readability feature that did not exisit before. Berners-Lee and colleagues coined the term “semantic web” to imply “adding meaning to the Web” as Web 3.0 technologies represent meaning using ontologies and offer reasoning through rules, relationships, conditions, and logic in those ontologies (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). This way, the generation would be able to enhance data management, support mobile internet accessibility, simulate innovation and creativity, enhance customer satisfaction, and organization collaboration (Choudhury, 2014). Besides, these early use cases and potentials of Web 3.0, increasing developments have aimed to address specific limitations of Web 2.0 such as those typical to the music industry.
Web 4.0 is an ongoing project and scholars in web technologies term its evolution as an era of ambient intelligence, artificial intelligence, and WebOS. The four generations of the web have different technologies, features, and use cases. The music industry has benefited predominantly with the introduction of web 2.0 and it is projected that web 3.0 will continue solving issues that its predecessor has failed to resolve. By 2016, Web 4.0 was still a revolutionary project still in the pipeline projected to materialize by 2020 (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). Technology extensions were expected to facilitate users to self-upgrade and the OS could reside in the cloud. Futurists during the time foresaw that humans would have multiple sources of data, including mobile phones, tablets, net books, laptops, desktops, and television, which would be connected to the Internet. Also known as the “symbiotic Web”, Web 4.0 will allow for human-computer interaction (HCI) using mind-controlled interfaces with effective organization of metadata. Using these technologies, computers would be clever to read web content, react by executing, and making decisions on what to execute first. This will significantly enhance load speeds of websites thus ensuring superior performance and quality of the Web (Solanki & Dongaonkar, 2016). Web 4.0, while not already become possible, will involve a form of Web that has the read-write-execute concurrency. It is also expected that the symbiotic Web will reach a critical mass of online engagement, thus providing global governance, transparency, participation, distribution and collaboration to critical communities, including politics, industry, and society (Shah, 2022). In general, with W...