Ole has acquired London-based rights management company Compact Media, who manage Audio-Visual Secondary Rights for more than 700 clients around the world.Compact will remain under its own brand and direction of David Johnson.
Source: Fresh from raising $500m, Ole acquires Compact Media – Music Business Worldwide
Earlier this year, a task force from the US Department of Commerce presented their findings of a 2-year study, suggesting that a compulsory license is undesirable. Instead, it recommends that the marketplace be left alone to figure this out.
On Wednesday, New York federal judge Ronnie Abrams delivered a new opinion in an important lawsuit. She finds that many of the licensing agreements that Sony Music have struck with streaming outlets like Spotify, Rhapsody and Last.FM are ambiguous as to how they describe streamed music.
Source: Judge Finds Sony-Spotify Agreement to Be Ambiguous in Big Royalties Lawsuit | Billboard
The Open Music Initiative (OMI) this week unveiled a new partnership with Intel to make the chip giant’s Sawtooth Lake blockchain technology as a reference platform for the open-source rights data architecture.
Under the arrangement, Sawtooth is expected to become a foundational platform for reference implementations of OMI’s protocols and APIs.
“We need to move from the phase of talking about things to the phase of doing something, OMI’s co-founder and director of Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship Panos Panay told RightsTech. “This [deal with Intel] is an important step in moving into that new phase.
According to Panay, Intel will work with OMI companies to create a “virtual sandbox” on the Sawtooth platform where developers can begin prototyping elements of OMI’s planned “minimum viable interoperability” framework.
“We have over 130 companies in OMI and it can get pretty unwieldy,” Panay said. “That’s why it was important for us to put a flag in the sand to say, we’re actually doing something.
“If this is going to work,” he added, “we have to start showing some results within the next six months or so.”
Panay said OMI had looked at a number of major technology companies as potential partners, but settled in Intel in part due to its “perceived neutrality” as a brand.
Intel is “a major technology player and a leader in the blockchain space and they bring instant credibility to what we’re trying to do,” Panay said.
Added Jerry Bautista, VP of Intel’s New Technology Group and GM of its New Business Group, “Blockchain technology offers the potential to address the rights management challenges that many industries, including music, face today. By using Sawtooth Lake as their foundational reference platform blockchain technology, OMI will be able to accelerate plans to deliver a music rights open source platform.”
We set out to build a shared, open, permissionless system where all of the world’s media metadata can coexist; this prototype was the first, small step towards that dream, and now it’s time to look back at its successes and failures and inform the next, bigger (!!) step.
A major side effect of these direct deals is that streaming on Pandora is no longer subject to the statutory rates set by the U.S. government and payable via SoundExchange. Not only is this a major loss of income for SoundExchange, it also removes an important layer of protection and oversight that the not-for- profit performing rights organization provided artists.
Source: Pandora’s New Direct Deals Are Very Bad News For SoundExchange And Potentially For Artists – hypebot
The paid streaming service, the first of its kind for a traditional radio outfit, will include a $5-a-month ad-free radio station and a $10-a-month on-demand music service, according to people familiar with iHeartMedia’s plans.
Source: iHeartMedia to launch paid music-streaming service: sources | New York Post
Accenture is challenging a defining feature of blockchain, its immutability, by patenting a system that will allow data processed and stored using the technology to be edited. The consultancy said on Tuesday data would only be edited under “extraordinary circumstances”, in order to resolve fat-finger-type human errors as well as to meet legal and regulatory requirements and address wrongdoing.
Source: Accenture breaks blockchain taboo with editing system | Reuters
The music business peaked in 1999, and it has been tumbling ever since. Now it looks like it’s starting to climb back up: Music sales in the first half of the year were up 8.4 percent, to $3.4 billion — the industry’s best performance since the height of the CD era.
Source: It took a couple decades, but the music business looks like it’s okay again – Recode
Right now, the main objective of the Commission is to give content creators a fair pay for their work by demanding companies to give creators a bigger percentage of ad-revenue. Perhaps blockchain-based media platforms will have a more positive turnout for content creators without the use of a third party.
Source: EU Demands Youtube to Pay More to Artists, Blockchain Can Do Better