Following Viberate’s announcement of ICO and goal to list and map the entire global music industry, the company has just added 50,000 music venue profiles and more than 200,000 event profiles to its crowdsourced database. Venues and events join over 120,000 musician profiles already online since spring to enable cryptocurrency payments for live performances.
The development team of Viberate hit the 2nd phase milestone early, as the venue profile launch wasn’t supposed to be online before the company’s $VIBE token crowdsale. As previously reported, beginning on September 5th, Viberate intends to raise $12 million from selling VIBE tokens to fund further development.
The company believes the most valuable advantage is the use of the escrow service in the smart contract. Payments are a big pain for musicians, especially those who are without professional representation. Artists often can get screwed over by club owners, not wanting to pay the full fee if the night didn’t go as planned. Usually, this is not due to the artist’s poor performance, so he or she cannot be held accountable for low ticket sales.
Escrow solves this effectively, but offering such service in fiat currencies means dealing with piles of lawyers/paperwork, often one country at the time. Tokenizing the business solves this on a global scale.
Vasja Veber, Viberate Co-founder, and COO said:
“We believe it so strongly that the founders and existing investors will reverse vest their tokens for 24 months, which is a standard for VC investing, but definitely not for ICOs.”
The VIBE token explained (more info can be seen in the white paper):
1. DISTRIBUTION
- After the initial supply from the crowdsale is sold out, Viberate will keep distributing tokens to users who contribute content to Viberate.com. Each time they will add a new profile of a musician and later even venue or event, they will earn VIBES.
- Users will also be rewarded for curating the information in existing profiles (in case they stumble upon a broken link or some outdated info). This way we will ensure a wide distribution of the token.
2. BUYBACKS
- At the beginning, the fund for rewarding contributors will be sourced from the initial supply of the tokens. Viberate will assign 5% of the total supply into the fund and will release them for the first couple of months equally into daily budgets.
- Later, when the company is generating revenue from its planned business models, a portion of the proceeds will be used to buy back VIBES from the market. Although unannounced, those buybacks will positively influence the volume and token liquidity on the exchanges.
3. ACCEPTING VIBE AS PAYMENT FOR SERVICES
- Besides acting as a marketplace for matching musicians with event organizers, the company will also exercise a number of other business models. Two of them will be implemented quite soon:
contacting VIP users (agents, managers) and advertising (profile exposure) - Right now Viberate has around 5,000 premium music industry contacts in its database. Getting to them is a great asset, but it won’t be free. Users have to go get Vibes and pay to e-mail them through our form.
- An up and coming musician will also have a chance to rub shoulders with the giants. For a fee (in VIBES of course), musicians will be able to buy premium sponsored positions on various charts, pretty much like they can buy Google AdWords to pop up on the top of search results.
4. PAYING FOR GIGS
- Eventually, the company hopes VIBE tokens can become a go-to currency for booking live acts. It should be noted though, that from the very beginning to ensure wide adoption of the platform, users will be able to book artists in other major cryptocurrencies as well as fiat.
- Gradually, the company will start pushing users towards using VIBE tokens for bookings. Artists who will allow bookings exclusively in VIBES will be incentivized by getting free exposure and jumping up higher in search results.
Check out below an interview with Viberate founders and advisors, including Charlie Shrem explaing the potential and reasons for the project:
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