The Age of the Digital Content Platform - a Spotify for Digital Art?

Spotify’s rise to prominence over the last two decades has revolutionised how consumers value digital music. 

Providing an easily accessible, curated, and expansive library of popular and niche musical artists, the platform has superseded the sea of digital piracy of the naughties.

With the digital art marketplace facing similar issues in its infancy, a digital service like Spotify could be the answer to securing much needed protection of IP and monetisation for artists. 

Could Sugar Glider Digital be that platform? 

The predecessor to Spotify: Napster

Spotify’s origins and success was a product of demand. A demand for a trusted, accessible, and affordable alternative against the piracy behemoth that was Napster. 

Napster pioneered and popularised peer-to-peer file sharing of digital audio files. Or in other words the free shareability of music, transforming music into a public good at the height of its dominance. 

Curated by a community of music fans, Napster’s expansive catalogue delivered unprecedented access for its users to new music, older songs, and unreleased content. 

However, without a record of provenance, proper recourse for monetisation, and IP protection, the platform was deemed “a wholesale infringement” against music industry copyrights by federal courts and was shut down soon after. 

Legality was the key to Spotify’s success

Despite popularising illegal music file sharing, Napster’s popularity was proof of concept for digital music platforms.

While delivering the same shareability, access, and community driven discovery of music as Napster, Spotify’s service model was also a clear evolution of the past. 

The incorporation of legal contracts and audio streaming, let users to listen to high quality music at a whim, creating seamless access to curated licensed music. 

Under a subscription model, this also removed the issues of price that platforms like Itunes failed to address, making supporting musical artists not only easy, but affordable. 

Digital Music and Digital Art share the same future 

The ability to “right-click save” and copy digital files, has democratised digital art for consumers, leaving the industry in a similar crisis of piracy and copyright infringement. 

When the price of fraudulent digital art is “free” and access to legitimate digital artworks is restrictive or pricey, consumers have shown the willingness to sacrifice fidelity and legitimacy for lower quality copies. 

‘floreo universitas’ by James McGrath. Using datasets of stars and scans of flowers McGrath presents a whole galaxy within a dainty flower.

As the intricacy and complexity of NFT art increases “right-click save” loses it’s viability.

However as Spotify demonstrates, what the market for digital content demands is not more piracy, but instead, an effective, accessible, and reliable platform. 

Sugar Glider Digital a specialised platform for digital art

Like Spotify and digital music, the world of digital art demands a platform that serves digital artists and consumers alike. 

Welcome to Sugar Glider Digital (SGD). 

SGD recognises the challenges of an oversaturated, fully open, and marketplace without IP protection. 

Curation is at the forefront of our service, with a specifically selected and honed selection of digital works, offering variety without the intimidation. 

Harnessing the power of Non-fungible Tokens and blockchain technology, provenance, artistic licence and security with SGD is guaranteed, supporting monetisation for a diverse range of artists. 

With our fully digital subscription platform, accessing quality digital art is simpler than ever, offering optimised display, affordability of rentals, and frictionless user experience. 

What does digital art need from a platform? Sugar Glider Digital is changing the way consumers value digital art through curation, affordability, and supporting artists. 

Words by Cam Thach