The dotBlockchain Music Project (dotBC), which aims to solve data, rights, ownership and payment issues in the music industry, has won backing from SOCAN and subsidiary MediaNet, plus Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA.
The partners will contribute technical and financial resources to the project, which will allow dotBC to accelerate its product development efforts.
DotBlockchain, co-created by PledgeMusic founder Benji Rogers (pictured), says it ‘seeks to revolutionize the music rights clearance process by creating an open system with blockchain technology and a file container to “wrap” rights information that links to a decentralized database’.
The combined companies have the potential to bring a catalogue of more than 65 million sound recordings from independent and major labels into the global ecosystem.
With more than 500,000 new recordings added each month, dotBC will be working with the majority of the music library.
“these pioneering companies are helping us to build and deploy the real-world architecture needed to create a fair, equitable and efficient way for the music industry to work together in the digital rights world.”
benji rogers, dotblockchain and pledgemusic
Said Rogers: ”In putting that first foot down, these pioneering companies are helping us to build and deploy the real-world architecture needed to create a fair, equitable and efficient way for the music industry to work together in the digital rights world.
”We could not be more excited to have the teams from these amazing companies involved. Industry-wide adoption of the dotBC format is our goal and this feels like a very promising first step.”
SOCAN CEO, Eric Baptiste, added: “SOCAN has always been at the forefront of transparency and accountability with innovations like ‘drill-down’ online royalty statements and calculators that have been available to our members for close to a decade now.
“We are convinced that it is possible to address payment and rights inefficiencies in the digital music world that have been a drag on the entire ecosystem for far too long.
”The encouraging work of dotBC has the potential to unlock enormous value for our members in that ever-evolving digital ecosystem.”
eric baptiste, socan
”The encouraging work of dotBC has the potential to unlock enormous value for our members in that ever-evolving digital ecosystem.”
Joe Conyers, GM of Songtrust and VP Technology of Downtown Music Publishing, said: “The dotBC team’s composition first approach represents a refreshing change to previous approaches to this data challenge and as such were excited to advance work toward distributed systems to help our songwriters and publishing partners.”
Tracy Maddux, CEO of CD Baby commented: “CD Baby is excited to work with dotBlockchain to assist our Independent artists and songwriters in managing their music rights and assuring payment.
“This approach to Blockchain technology could change everything for DIY musicians.”
Pieter van Rijn, CEO of FUGA, concluded: “The potential of blockchain technologies to revolutionize rights and royalties is well documented.
“At FUGA we strive to remain at the frontier of such innovations, so we’re delighted to be rolling up our sleeves for this project in cooperation with some of our clients.”
Music Business Worldwide
