In the last decade, blockchain technology was considered a unique solution with the potential to solve business challenges in different industries: from insurance and banking to health, ...
In the last decade, blockchain technology was considered a unique solution with the potential to solve business challenges in different industries: from insurance and banking to health, education, telecommunications and many more.
Entrepreneurs have been working hard to adopt the blockchain in the music industry with the intention of solving problems that so far have not been addressed effectively. Many sectors of the music industry, including the audiovisual sector, see blockchain technology as a potential solution to copyright and ownership issues.
According to experts, the lack of transparency of proprietary data (metadata) is one of the biggest problems that the music industry has been facing for a long time. As Benji Rogers, CEO and co-founder of PledgeMusic, says in his blog Cuepoint: "The metadata in this case is the basic information that is needed to identify who wrote, interpreted and owned the music you listen to every day." The validity of these data is considered crucial for performers and those who have created and worked on a particular song, so that they can charge when someone touches, listens or distributes their work.
Therefore, Rogers suggests an innovative solution based on the blockchain: a decentralized and globally accessible database that is expected to hold and keep the metadata of all the music already created and the one that will be created in the future. This public space would allow artists to represent themselves and give companies the opportunity to use this music database and find all the information they need using the basis of the data collected.
Rogers calls this a "fair trade music database," where any song would need to have a minimum set of data (Minimum Viable Data), encrypted in each job. If the project succeeds, the positive result will be that the MVD of each song could be introduced into a kind of a decentralized global ledger, owned by all members of the music industry. Industry representatives would be able to cope with problems of ownership, fees and transparency.
This sounds almost futuristic, especially for people, who have never before heard of blockchain technology and its potential use in different industries. Generally, people believe that most industries, with the exception of the banking and insurance sectors, need much more time, research and development to make good use of blockchain technology.
However, we have been reading a lot about the industry projects that are already testing this innovative technology. There are significant examples in the music industry too: the dotBlockchain Music (dotBC) project (co-founded by Benji Rogers) was announced recently, in partnership with industry partners, SOCAN (including its subsidiary MediaNet ), Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA.
The idea behind the DotBC project is that by using blockchain technology, the industry will be able to create an easily accessible database, solving problems related to music copyright. Although DotBC is still in its trial period, Rogers is certain that the project will be valuable to the future of the music industry. Rogers said: "We hope to include not only companies, but also individual artists and composers, DJ's and musicians, so that everyone can be fairly represented within the system."