May, 2017

Sony/ATV has partnered with Lyric Financial to enable their U.S. songwriters and publishing clients to request advances in less than a minute.

Source: Sony/ATV Partners With Lyric Financial Fast Royalty Advances To Songwriters, Publishers – hypebot

PubMatch, the global rights trading platform owned by Combined Book Exhibit Publishers Weekly parent company PWxyz, has reached an agreement with the Beijing International Book Fair to promote Chinese content worldwide.

Source: PubMatch In Deal with Beijing Book Fair

Relays are won in the exchange zone, where the hand-off is crucial. The same applies to metadata in the music industry. Even with metadata-driven companies/consortiums a universally accepted standard does not exist to reign-in human inconsistency when dealing with metadata.

Source: The Metadata Race: A Contest That Record Labels Can Win – hypebot

Eleanor McEvoy, chair of IMRO, and Victor Finn, CEO, spoke at an event in Brussels seeking reassurances that internet platforms for user-uploaded content that use music, do so in a manner that ensures fair return to musicians and composers for their works.

Source: IMRO welcome Digital single market copyright proposals | Music | News | Hot Press

Innovators like Blockai , Pixsy , TinEye and Ascribe promise to use decentralized ledger technology to register and protect against copyright infringement. They understand that a public, decentralized ledger like the blockchain is ideal for cataloging and storing original works of art, digital intellectual property, documents, manuscripts, photographs and images, away from any central authority.

Source: Verifying Intellectual Property On The Blockchain – Nasdaq.com

Teosto is developing a blockchain platform for faster and more transparent tracking and processing of royalties for music authors and publishers. Designed by Teosto Futures Lab, the Pigeon platform will provide copyright societies with versatile digital tools that enable faster information flows of performance reports and payment data between different societies globally.

Source: Teosto develops a blockchain platform for music copyright organisations | Teosto

I put it to you that blockchains today aren’t like the Internet in 1996; they’re more like Linux in 1996. That is in no way a dig — but, if true, it’s something of a death knell for those who hope to profit from mainstream usage of blockchain apps and protocols.

Source: Blockchains are the new Linux, not the new Internet | TechCrunch

In a major victory for indie musicians, the combined class action lawsuits against Spotify brought by Cracker frontman and artist advocate David Lowery and singer/songwriter Melissa Ferrick have been settled with the music streamer establishing a $43.4 million fund to compensate songwriters and publishers whose work had been used by the service without proper licensing.

Source: Spotify Settles David Lowery, Melissa Ferrick Class Action Lawsuit with $43.4 Million Compensation Fund – hypebot

The RIAA, which represents the major labels, has filed in opposition to new government regulations that would guarantee musicians and other creators their so-called moral rights. “A new statutory attribution right, in addition to being unnecessary, would likely have significant unintended consequences,” the RIAA wrote in comments to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Source: It’s Not If Artists Deserve “Moral Rights” Recognition, But How Music Industry Should Achieve It, says RIAA – hypebot