This app has been created in response to recent YouTube changes which have prevented our site visitors from playing embedded YouTube music videos and listening to streamed music from YouTube a lot of the time. We are by no means the only music web site affected, and visitors to other popular music sites such as discogs.com, playback.fm, musicvf.com and playlistresearch.com, to name but a few, are prevented from playing embedded YouTube videos on those sites a lot of the time also, and there are no doubt many others. This is what web site visitors see all too often now instead of the YouTube video image:

So in order to watch the video in question the visitor has to go to YouTube and watch some ads first, most likely. Kind of defeats the purpose of embedding YouTube videos on ones web site really. At other times site visitors may see the splash screen image of a video displayed normally but when they click to start the video nothing happens.

It is very likely that the reason for this continual disabling of embedded videos on various music web sites such as ours by YouTube is connected with copyright issues and/or advertising revenue. As you may know, virtually any song you care to mention can be found on a Youtube video and played free of charge. In theory it should be the advertising and premium membership fees received by YouTube that pay the owners of the music their recording and publishing royalties, but in reality this does not happen a lot of the time. When a music video is embedded on another web site, for example, in many cases there is no YouTube advertising displayed on the video, and therefore the owners of the music and the recording artists receive nothing at all.

Also, in order for the music owners to get paid royalties from videos containing their music that are played on YouTube they first need to make a claim directly to YouTube, and most never do. After a music owner has made such a claim to YouTube then videos containing their music are normally demonetized if they are currently monetized, and ads are placed on them to pay royalties to the music owners, but once again this does not work with embedded videos on other sites more often than not. Most copyright owners will be OK if video creators use their music in exchange for having ads running in the videos, but this is not always happening and many artists and copyright holders receive little or nothing from Youtube.

There are similar issues with music streaming platforms such as Spotify, who, contrary to what you might have heard, do not pay artist royalties according to a per-play or per-stream rate; the royalty payments that artists receive vary according to differences in how their music is streamed or the agreements they have with labels or distributors, but if an artist no longer has such an agreement with a record label or distributor then they receive nothing at all from Spotify or other music streaming services it would seem.

In the old days prior to the advent of digital music this was not really a problem as artists knew more or less how many copies of their records had been sold, but as most music is either streamed or downloaded nowadays, most artists receive very little income from their recordings, if any, and have no knowledge whatsover as to how many of their songs have been downloaded and streamed. This is an inherent problem with intangible goods in general which upto now has not had a solution. Happily though, with the launch of the BitSong (BTSG) crypto currency last year a solution to the issue of music royalties is now at hand.

What is BTSG?
BitSong is a blockchain ecosystem to empower the music industry (https://bitsong.io). It unites artists, fans, distributors in an environment where music, merchandise, and fan loyalty are assets of value. BitSong's decentralized ecosystem of services provide the global music community with a trustless marketplace for music streaming, fan tokens, and NFTs (Non-fungible tokens), powered by the BTSG token. 'Trustless' doesn't mean that blockchains exist without trust; instead, it means that two people who don't have established trust between them can rely on a system they do trust, in order to do business or otherwise interact.

BitSong was conceived in 2018 by developer and entrepreneur Angelo Recca. Angelo realized that while the digitalization of music has brought many benefits to the industry, it’s also created a new set of problems around the ownership of music and attribution of royalties. He joined forces with Iulian Anghelin and BitSong was born. After launching the main BitSong blockchain in August 2020, the bitsong-2b mainnet went live on October 21, 2021. Featuring Fan Tokens, NFTs, and music streaming platform, all underpinned by secure, robust, battle-tested blockchain technology, the launch of BitSong marks a turning point in the ongoing development of the music industry.

BTSG is a distributed (open source) blockchain music ecosystem designed to create a decentralized hub that interconnects the various market players the mission of which is to decentralize the music sector by simplifying the bureaucracy as much as possible in order to offer artists a meritocratic, transparent, fast and intermediary-free earning model and users a new way to listen to music and earn money. BitSong runs on its own, energy-efficient proof-of-stake blockchain, with sound green credentials.

BitSong is a real decentralized ecosystem of services and an active community of artists, music providers and fans (listeners) that aims to become the only point of reference within the digital music market. BitSong can be seen as a platform that gives the artists what is rightfully theirs. As discussed earlier, the default methods used by music streaming services such as Spotify and video platforms such as Youtube are nowhere beneficial to the artists in making money. Even from the streaming platforms' perspective, the low amount of subscription packages sold hardly affects the income. BitSong thus changes the whole picture of how artists can fund and make money, including their fans. The artists receive royalties in the form of BTSG tokens and the fans buy, sell and trade BTSG for profit, just like other cryptocurrencies, and receive fan tokens for listening to music.

BTSG was first tradable on 21st Mar, 2021. It has a total supply of 121,925,429. As of right now (June 2022) BTSG has a market capitalization of $1,093,202 USD. The current price of BTSG is $0.017 and it is #5523 on the Coinmarketcap.com cryptocurrency ranking chart.

Unlike other main cryptocurrencies, BTSG cannot currently be directly purchased with fiat currency. However, you can still easily buy and trade this coin if you want to by first buying Ethereum from any fiat-to-crypto exchange and then transferring it to Metamask crypto wallet where it can be swapped for BTSG. You can also purchase Etherium using a credit card or bank transfer from the providers in Metamask if you prefer. If you're an artist, and you think the current royalty system is broken as we do, it doesn't hurt to download MetaMask, and begin exploring what other musicians are doing in the NFT space.

To summerize then, BTSG is the ultimate currency for music, powering all the features of the BitSong ecosystems where artists, music industry participants, and fans can use BTSG to buy, sell and trade NFTs as well as swap BTSG for other cryptocurrencies on centralized and decentralized exchanges and stake BTSG to a Validator to help secure the network and earn more BTSG as rewards.

Press here to read more about how BitSong is using blockchain to empower the music industry.

In common with Bitsong music streaming platform, the SoulJukebox app also operates with a full set of data from the start based on an artist's number of chart entries, highest chart positions attained, and number of weeks in chart of each song, ensuring artists accurately receive 100% of the royalties they deserve, payed to them in BTSG either monthly or annually. They can then swap the BTSG for Etherium and cash it out at one of the major crypto exchanges such as Binance. As the SoulJukebox app is a tangible product as opposed to a digital download, it is very much simpler to keep track of the number of units sold in order to calculate the royalties and revenue share of each artist, and BTSG is the ideal NFT to help revolutionize the way that artists receive their royalties.

Soulyears.com features just about every Soul R&B single that ever made it into the US R&B and UK Pop charts between 1956 and 2010 as well as many thousands more that didn't chart or were only released as album tracks - some 32,500+ songs in all, and most site visitors come here to listen to songs, read song lyrics, and view chart information, but as most of the songs streamed from YouTube no longer play a lot of the time, we decided to make them available on a much improved version of the Soulyears.com web app that runs entirely from a USB flash drive in Chromium or Firefox web browsers utilizing a built-in Apache 2 server similar to the ones used by internet web site hosting services.

Our new app therefore runs completely independently of the Internet and can be used anywhere in the world on just about any Windows or Apple Mac PC or laptop computer. It even comes with its own built-in self-booting Linux operating system enabling it to be used on computers/laptops with faulty hard drives or no hard drive at all even. So if you have an old Windows or Mac laptop that no longer boots up laying around collecting dust you can now turn it into your own soul R&B jukebox simply by setting it to boot from USB and inserting our new SoulJukebox USB app into it! .

A major problem with digitally downloaded music is that a song or album can be paid for once and downloaded in mp3 format from a site such as iTunes or Amazon and then shared with others multiple times. The artists and music owners receive no revenue at all from this shared music of course. What makes Soul Jukebox very unique and different is that there are no mp3 or other format audio files on it that can be copied and shared at all as all the songs and music are integrated into the app software itself, and as the software will only run on the flashdrive it was distributed on, it is not possible to make copies of or successfully clone the USB drive to share with others, thus ensuring that the artists, music owners, distributors, etc., receive the royalties they rightly deserve.

Our new SoulJukebox app has a great many new and improved features compared with the Soulyears.com web app, which has not been updated for a number of years, and no longer works as well it used to. With the new SoulJukebox app you will have access to all the same chart information and song lyrics as Soulyears.com and will be able to add your own song lyrics to songs that do not presently have the lyrics as well as modify existing song lyrics to correct mistakes. You will also be able to add comments to individual songs, and group them together in categories, as well as create an unlimited number of playlists. Needless to say, the SoulJukebox app runs at lightning speed in comparison to Soulyears.com website as it does not run from the internet but instead from its own built-in web server as mentioned above.

The Souljukebox app is supplied on a high quality Sandisk brand USB flashdrive and is available in 32GB and 128GB versions for Windows (version 7 upwards) and Mac OSX operating systems. The 32GB "Lite" version features the top 100 soul r&b songs for every year from 1956-2010 as well as a large collection of soul r&b videos as well. The full 128GB version features all 32,500+ songs by 9,000+ artists that are featured on the Soulyears.com website. It also features a Weekly Chart section where you will be able to search and look up the legendary weekly Cashbox Magazine soul/r&b charts from 1950 right upto 1996 when the magazine stopped publishing the charts.

The SoulJukebox app also has a Radio random-play mode allowing you to choose a category from Disco Dance, Funk Sounds, Hip Hop/Rap, Instrumental, Jazzy Sounds, Night Grooves, Reggae, Southern Soul and Tamla Motown, and it will continually play random songs from your chosen category just like an FM radio station. The SoulJukebox app even includes a slideshow which you can set to turn on at a chosen interval after which it will display beautiful Nature photos and paintings while you listen to the beautiful music!

The Souljukebox app is truly one of a kind, and there is no other portable music app in the world that even comes close in comparison. Any fan of soul, r&b, funk, disco dance, reggae, hip hop, pop, ballads, etc., is sure to love this new app. It also makes an awesome and affordable as well as very unusual gift for others. And most importantly, it is the first portable music app in the world to provide artists with the opportunity to receive their full royalty dues in Bitsong crypto currency.

Soul Jukebox is supplied on a good quality Sandisk flashdrive that comes with our own 3-year warranty and license as well as a 5 year manufacturer's warranty. Once our 3 year warranty period and license have expired the device will continue to operate for a time but may stop working soon after, so it is advisable to purchase a new updated one by then. By doing so you will be helping to support the recording artists also who receive a share of the profits from every Soul Jukebox sold.