March, 2016

SoundCloud’s Next Move Will Change the Streaming Game (Again)

While the label control over the paid tier is a play to rights-holders, perhaps more crucially, the user-generated remixes help preserve SoundCloud’s status as a music community. “The ­audience that is buying electronic albums and festival tickets is hanging out on SoundCloud,” says James Collinson, head of Ninja Tune North America. “It’s an artist tool and an artist community.”

Still, the question remains: “Does the world need another streaming service?” as Russ Crupnick, managing partner of the MusicWatch consultancy, puts it. “It’s going to be hard.”

And despite SoundCloud’s enviable reach, how much of its generally young and tech-savvy audience will pay for music they mostly have been ­enjoying for free? “Looking at conversion rates, it’s likely they’ll end up with low single digits,” says Mark Mulligan, an analyst at Midia Research, based on comparisons with other free services. But even a 5 ­percent ­conversion rate from SoundCloud’s 175 million users — 8.7 ­million — would make it a serious player.

Source: Billboard

Streaming Deal Between ABC, Warner Bros. Signals Change for SVOD Rights

In the trench war between TV networks and streaming services over series stacking rights, ABC has broken through enemy lines.

On March 18, the network announced a deal with Warner Bros. Television that will make all in-season episodes of any future series from the studio available on ABC digital platforms. Networks tend to stack five rolling episodes for most shows.

The ABC-Warner Bros. deal acknowledges the continued shift toward time-shifted viewing and binge watching.It also gives ABC a victory over the digital competition — in particular Netflix. The streaming service has asserted often that it will not pay top dollar for shows that don’t come with exclusivity, making it difficult for networks to secure stacking rights.

Source: Variety

Mediachain: Protect Digital Content With a Bitcoin-Based Metadata Protocol

Mine Labs, a New York-based blockchain startup has announced the development of Mediachain, a Bitcoin blockchain-based decentralized metadata protocol which relies on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to protect and ensure the rights to creative digital works.

Since early 2015, emerging blockchain startups have begun to focus on the development of blockchain-based identity and authentication systems to assist artists, freelancers and digital content providers to protect their work from being plagiarised.

To encrypt and store digital rights on the Bitcoin blockchain, most of these blockchain startups have either encoded an ID into the Bitcoin blockchain using OP_RETURN or CoinSpark to reference centrally hosted data or used a custom-built blockchain to attach metadata directly to transactions.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Music Reports Launches New Tool to Begin Solving ‘The Database Problem’

Music Reports has launched an unnamed rights administration platform aimed at clearing up publishing information for the millions of songs, largely from independent artists, that are digitally distributed through platforms like CD Baby and TuneCore.

Music Reports estimates 500,000-750,000 new recordings are released on streaming services every month; the company hopes to ensure that the publishing data on these songs is registered, up-to-date, and can be matched against commercially released master recordings.

Since most digital distributors don’t provide publishing information when placing music on streaming services, when the publishers and songwriters are not known those works are directed to a rights administration system, where songwriters or their publishers can claim those songs, allowing for publishing payments to be made.

Source: Billboard

Spotify Inks “No Copyright Claim” Royalty Deal with Music Publishers

money-protest-power-fist-biz-2015-billboard-650Spotify has agreed to do a better job at allowing music publishers and songwriters to claim and receive royalties from the streaming service. However there’s a caveat: to strike the settlement deal with Spotify, copyright holders cannot make an infringement claim against the company.

In recent months, Spotify has faced a number of lawsuits from musicians who have challenged the Sweden-based firm’s alleged failure to licence artists’ works before making them available for streaming.

On Thursday, US trade body the National Music Publishers’ Association said that the settlement deal it had struck with Spotify represented a “landmark industry agreement.”

Source: Ars Technica UK

Does Blockchain Hold the Key to Music’s Future?

A song doesn’t just happen. There are composers, lyricists, performers. Rights of ownership are divvied up across those parties, labels, publishers, distributors and possibly other entities. And the sale of one company to another means a small forest worth of paperwork to keep the records current and ensure all parties are properly paid for their work.

What if there were an easier way, one that not only allowed all the rights and ownership privileges of a song to remain together in an open, publicly readable and researchable database, but also gave artists the ability to post their song directly and collect payment every time a download or album was sold?Welcome to the world of blockchain.

Source: A Journal of Musical Things

Could a Blockchain-Based Registry Ever Replace the Copyright Office?

Blockchaicopyrightn technology opens up the possibility for a provider to offer an immutable registry of transactions, held on a decentralized network of computers.

While financial applications continue to dominate the blockchain development landscape, as we’ve detailed in prior posts there are a growing number of companies offering registries for digital content, including Monegraph, ConSensys, Stem, Mediachain, ascribe and others.

A content registry, for the most part, is a registry of the ownership of intellectual property, most prominently copyright. Ideally, such a registry would accurately record original ownership of a work, and then also record all subsequent transactions involving that work. Since copyright interests are divisible, this can become an extremely complicated tree of transactions, very rapidly.

Source: JDSupra

The Key to Blockchain Adoption: Make It Cheaper

An awareness is dawning in the industry that blockchain—the technology behind (really, interwoven with) BitCoin—is the main story. BitCoin is almost a distraction, a sideshow to the real deal. Most people have heard of BitCoin, the “cryptocurrency.” In simple terms, BitCoin is value that resides in computer networks. It seems to be mysteriously reliable, partly because it is verified by multiple parties.

Source: Techonomy

Apple Music, Dubset Partner to Stream Previously Unlicensed Remixes and DJ Mixes

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues.

Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service. Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Source: Billboard

Can BitTeaser’s Blockchain Ads Network Disrupt ‘Pay-Per-Click’ Market?

Advertising is indexbig business and as increasing activity moves online, so too do the marketing dollars. While 2015 saw an estimated $170.5 billion (bn) spent on online advertising globally, this figure is projected to mushroom almost 50% by 2018 to $252bn. But can anyone apart from the big guys snap up a slice of this lucrative business and leverage the Internet of Things to achieve it?

Until recently only the big players were able to get into it. Software though has made it possible for some webmasters to serve adverts and generate revenues based on their own traffic. Yet profiting from the advertising sector more broadly was a complex undertaking out of reach to the ordinary punter and investor.

Now to solve the problem, a group of future tech innovators from Denmark and the US have used the power of ‘peer-to-peer’ platforms to throw the doors open to everyone. Effectively they are offering anyone who wants it a piece of a pie that isn’t getting smaller any time soon.

Source: Forbes

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