MusiCoin
Alas, generative music never took off. For a while it was thought to be the future, where music would randomly compose itself from individual segments stored in a database--essentially a music AI.
I've had a change of heart about it, at least from a musical standpoint (and may change again) but there is another use, namely using it to track usage and rights.
Bitcoin may never be used widely as currency, but using the blockchain might be interesting to mine and track music metadata. How that gets implemented is still hugely complex.
It could work like this: Individual segments from music would be saved as individual files, in increments ranging from note durations to various phrase lengths (in measures) and would be meta-tagged using the Music Ontology schema.
The blockchain would be used to prove ownership of the (parent) master copy, along with an accompanying waveform. Just as a photographer can prove ownership through sites like Ascribe, a songwriter could assign or assert rights in a composition or its derivations.
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Post-script 6/28/2015: Amazon's new Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count royalty payments by pages read has interesting implications for the form of the content. What if in fact all intellectual property was similarly micro-monetized? If musicians were paid by the bar, or by the note value, art would begin to be shaped by jiggering the metrics to be paid more: more/less notes/durations, etc. This is another example of the medium creating messages.
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[6/13/2025: The generative music that I'm referring to here is the “old” generative music, like Ssyeo’s Koan program from the 90s, or Sony’s Flow Music based on Markov Chains. 10 years on, I still see no promise of monetization at this micro level. What you're talking about is a new form of industry, as there was a music industry at one point. What typically happens with industries, is that they change or collapse, and something takes their place. But 25 years after Napster, we are really not in a position where we can say we have a music industry as it existed before. But that's the reason that Napster emerged: it was because the industry became too bloated. So if we ever got to the point where we could monetize music based on notes or bars, it would become too bloated eventually. Perhaps we should accept the idea that Things become bloated, and we just have to work with them that way.]
