Dozens of technology, law and music professionals gathered at the Japan Society in New York on Tuesday for the inaugural RightsTech Summit, determined to brainstorm how partnerships between tech companies and content creators could drive smarter rights management and monetization.
Rights tech, like freight forwarding and other under-the-radar industries, is unsexy but wholly necessary, and profitable if done right. Most music-tech startups tend to focus on “first-mile” problems in artists’ careers, such as discovery, marketing and crowdfunding. The last mile—what happens when finished musical works are digitized and, in Rogers’ words, “drop off a data and revenue cliff”—has remained largely untransformed.