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...