April, 2016

A Surprisingly Interesting Dive Into Classical Music Metadata 

musical scoreDigital service providers (DSPs) have copped a lot of flack for a perceived lack of support for classical music. Some of the criticism has been leveled at the methodologies used to ingest and display classical, which can vary widely from store to store. A universal standard amongst stores for organising classical music would be ideal. However, this is half the problem; for DSPs to ever display classical metadata correctly, they’ll always be reliant on a supply of consistently good metadata.

One solution is to supply classical content in a way that’s homogenous with the way the same content is managed by the digital services that invest the most in it. iTunes, in particular, has an established methodology for classical metadata, which encompasses many millions of albums and tracks. Their conventions therefore heavily influence how we should supply our metadata. Or to put it another way, do as the store demands consistently, or don’t see it on store.

Source: A Surprisingly Interesting Dive Into Classical Music Metadata – hypebot

You Can Now Buy Games on Steam Using Bitcoin

Valve has partnered with Bitcoin payment service Bitpay to bring everyone’s favorite cryptocurrency to games platform Steam. Bitpay says it was approached by the company because it wanted to internationalize its operation, making it easier for Steam users in emerging markets to to buy games without using a credit card.

“While more users are coming online in these countries, traditional payment options like credit cards often aren’t available,” said Bitpay in a blog post. “As the internet’s universal currency, Bitcoin will allow Steam to easily reach gamers in every market around the world — without the high fees or the risk of chargeback fraud that come with card payments.”

Source: The Verge

ASCAP Payout to Industry Falls by $16m, Despite Revenue Growth

US licensing body ASCAP collected more than $1bn for the second year in a row in 2015 – but paid out some $16.1m less to songwriters and publishers.

As a result, the collection society’s overall cost-to-income ratio moved in the wrong direction for rights-holders – despite its expenses actually dropping in the year.

Total receipts at ASCAP last year hit $1.015bn, up 1.3% on the $1.002bn collected in 2014. However, 2015 saw distributions of $867.4m to ASCAP’s 560,000 members in the US and around the world.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

Valve Begins Accepting Bitcoin As Payment Method On Steam

Gamers may soon be able to buy their favorite video games with bitcoin, the world’s most popular and valuable cryptocurrency, thanks to a partnership between the digital distribution platform Steam and the payment processor BitPay.

Although neither Steam nor its developer Valve has commented on this development, gamers Tuesday began seeing the option to pay with bitcoin appear when adding credit to their accounts. However, BitPay has published a blog post on the agreement between the parties with Rory Desmond, the company’s head of business development in North America and the Asia-Pacific region, saying it was Valve that contacted his firm about the possibility of facilitating the new payment method.

Source: IBT

Welcome to the RightsTech Revolution

Digital-handConcurrent Media Strategies, LLC, publisher of the Concurrent Media blog, and Digital Media Wire, Inc., producers of Digital Entertainment World and the New York Media Festival, among other conferences, today announced the official launch of RightsTech, a new forum — blog, newsletter, conferences — for cross-industry global collaboration focused on furthering technology innovation around rights management and licensing across multiple media verticals.

The inaugural RightsTech Summit will be held July 26 at the the Japan Society in New York City. The newsletter, which you can subscribe to here, will keep you up to date on all the news and conversation around the emerging RightsTech ecosystem. This blog will be an evolving platform for discussion and debate among the various stakeholders.

Will We Ever Hear the Hundreds of Songs Prince Left Behind?

It’s important to understand that even unreleased songs are protected by copyright as soon as an artist writes them down.

“Once [Prince] created it,” says Mike Carrier, a law professor at Rutgers, “it was fixed. It wasn’t just in his head. He didn’t just sing it once; he recorded it.” Still, no one knows who owns those copyrights now. Given his history with, and distrust of, the music industry, Prince’s heir or heirs may well fully own the recordings. Copyright lasts the life of the artist, plus 70 years.

(Mark your calendars for 2086, when Purple Rain enters the public domain.)

But “copyright is so much more about contracts, than it is about federal policy,” Vaidhyanathan says. “A copyright holder has tremendous power over what happens, how it’s released to the world.” We can’t say anything for sure so soon after his death, when so much remains unknown, but we can speculate. So let’s speculate.

Source: WIRED

For Blockchain VCs, the Time for Ethereum Investments Has Come

Just a few months after the platform’s production launch, the first Ethereum startups are already receiving interest, and in some cases, undisclosed investments, from digital currency-focused VC firms.

Interviews with four of the leading blockchain and digital currency industry investors revealed that many are already performing due diligence on startups utilizing the decentralized application platform. Announced in 2014, Ethereum has gained significant traction of late following a successful hard fork and testing from major financial institutions.

Source: CoinDesk

U.K. Minister Calls for Intellectual Property Framework ‘Fit for Purpose in the Digital Age’

The U.K.’s dedicated IP minister Baroness Neville-Rolfe has used the occasion of World Intellectual Property Day (April 26) to call for an IP framework “fit for purpose in the digital age.”

“The process of digitization has transformed the world around us at a furious pace. It has revolutionized the way we work; the way we interact; and the way we shop,” said Neville-Rolfe in a blog post referencing the “symbiotic relationship between digital and IP.” “The creative sector must be able to protect and benefit from intellectual property,” she went on to say, adding that if the U.K. wants to secure its future as a “nation of innovators, we need to make sure our IP framework is fit for purpose.”

Source: Billboard

Can Real-Time Video Watermarking Take a Bite Out of Piracy?

safestream-storyWhen you stream a video, from Netflix or Hulu or YouTube or HBO Go or whatever else you have on hand, there’s a basic assumption: That video is for you to watch, and just that once.

Maybe you share it with whoever else is in the room at the time, but it’s given with the condition that you’re just taking it in as a one-off right there, not saving it forever, not rebroadcasting it somewhere else. It’s how the system works and how the deals are made.

 But even with paywalls and user names and passwords, even though that stream might be broken up by ads, there’s a pristine piece of video somewhere in the code—unadulterated video beamed down from whatever server. A stream that, if you really wanted to, you could find a way to rip to your hard drive and upload to The Pirate Bay. A stream you could broadcast back out again, with your own ads up against it. That’s just the way that it goes. But what if that video had your name right there in it?

 

Source: Popular Mechanics

Streaming Technology is Revitalizing Video as an Educational Tool in Academia, but there are Challenges Ahead for Libraries

workstationAcademic streaming video vendors, such as market leaders Films on Demand, Alexander Street, and Kanopy, tend to argue that regardless of any trade-offs made when licensing content rather than purchasing physical copies, the value of licensed streaming content is self-evident in increased usage and resulting lower cost per circ.

“VHS is dead…and DVD is almost dead—anyone who has an Apple [recent model iMac or MacBook] now doesn’t have a DVD player. And DVDs are becoming defunct. They’re getting damaged, they’re getting weeded, and they’re getting lost. And only one person can watch at a time,” says Tom Humphrey, COO of Kanopy, discussing the broader consumer transition to streaming and the corresponding demand for streaming video resources in higher ed.

“Is it better to have a DVD on the shelf that’s going to sit there for ten years and only get watched once, or am I better off putting $100 toward something that is going to generate 1,000 plays over the course of the year” before requiring renewal? Humphrey asks.

Source: Library Journal

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