dotBlockchain proves music publishers and organizations are searching for a music industry alternative.
The dotBlockchain Music Project (dotBC) started with interesting goal in mind. dotBC aims to solve complex data, rights, ownership, and payment issues that currently plague the music industry. The project and its founders seek to revolutionize the music rights clearance process by creating an open system with blockchain technology. The file container will allow organizations to “wrap” rights information that will link to a decentralized database. The project wants to tackle one of the music industry’s most talked about topics: getting artists paid. Now, as it prepares to enter “Phase Two,” dotBC will not have to undertake this hefty initiative alone.
Today, the dotBlockchain Music Project announced its first four industry partners. Canadian Music rights organization SOCAN, its wholly owned subsidiary MediaNet, publishing royalty administrator Songtrust, indie music distributor CDBaby, and digital rights service FUGA will all contribute to the project. The four companies took the bold step of publicly attaching themselves to the company.
The partnering companies give dotBC a collective starting point of 65 million songs. Their vital technical and financial resources will also allow dotBlockchain to accelerate its product development efforts. Along with the 65 million songs, dotBC will also receive more than 500,000 new recordings each month. This ensures comprehensive coverage of recorded works for the music project.
Along with the four publicly named companies, other key digital service providers and rights holders will support the project. Yet, according to dotBC, they’ve chosen to remain “behind the scenes for now.”
Following the public backing, dotBC now enters “Phase Two” of its Music Project. Phase One started last year with the GitHub release of the project source code. dotBlockchain invited industry leaders as well as investors to try out the project. Those who checked out the source code could create .bc codes containing rights information and “wrap” them around a file.
Speaking about the announcement, Benji Rogers, co-founder and project lead, said,
“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 also released a statement praising the collaboration.
“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.”
Joe Conyers, Songtrust GM and VP Technology of Downtown Music Publishing added,
“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.”
CD Baby CEO Tracy Maddux said,
“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.”
FUGA CEO Pieter van Rijn commented,
“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.”
Forbes, the Financial Times, and Fortune, along with Wall Street have written countless articles about dotBC’s market potential. As dotBlockchain moves forward, the project is currently onboarding more partners as well as artists, songwriters, and service providers.
I think that whether this issue is addressed by a centralized, curated database, or a decentralized, open database, the challenge will be educating the many thousands of rights owners to actually use it, particularly DIY artists who don’t even know the difference between publishing and master rights.