This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will determine the technical and commercial feasibility of a cloud-enabled digital art service that facilitates a free and global exchange of user-generated music. A recent convergence of digital technology has dramatically changed the way music is created, distributed, consumed, and commercialized. An opportunity now exists to facilitate a global, open, and free musical exchange directly between producer and consumer. Cloud computing offers the ability to facilitate this exchange in a highly scalable, capable, and cost efficient manner. Cloud computing also enables a cloud-based music consumption methodology which eliminates the consumer burdens of file management, availability, and backup. Phase I research will determine the technical and commercial feasibility of a service that addresses this opportunity by developing a fully cloud-enabled infrastructure using a Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture and publicly launching the service for the collection and analysis of empirical data.
The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is the greater technological understanding of the robustness and cost efficiencies of media-driven, cloud computing application deployments, and a potentially extreme disruption of current music markets and music consumption methods. The proposed service will initially be commercialized through an affiliate marketing model fostering commerce throughout the affiliate sphere. If successful, the project would ultimately provide: consumers with free cloud-based music, producers with a free outlet to market brands, affiliates with expanded markets, and society with democratized music.
This Small Business Innovation Research project addressed the Digital Arts subtopic under Information and Communication Technologies and created an innovative digital arts service in response to an emerging market using cloud technology. Music is important. It is deeply rooted in human nature and throughout our life experience. Over the past century, the artistic and economic activity surrounding music recording was concentrated in a small number of companies. Over the past decade, a convergence of digital technology has dramatically transformed the way music is created, distributed, consumed, and commercialized. This barrier-of-entry reduction enables an unprecedented mass participation in music recording that spreads this artistic and economic activity more equitably. This project demonstrated the technical feasibility of an innovative low cost, cloud-based infrastructure that facilitates a global and direct exchange of music between producers and consumers. The architecture was designed using Representational State Transfer (REST) principles, for flexibility, technology independence, robustness, and external API compatibility. Architectural principles were proven through the development and soft launch of a minimally viable system platform and subsequent collection of real-world user data. The outcome was an innovative and state-of-the-art deployment of cloud technology into a platform that provides consumers music with cloud convenience, producers with direct access to consumers, affiliates with expanded markets, and society with democratized music.
