The BBC is embroiled in a legal battle over how much it pays songwriters for using their work on the radio and in television shows. The broadcaster is fighting demands for a substantial increase in the estimated £70m a year it hands to PRS for Music.
Source: Going for a song: BBC in royalties fight | Business | The Times & The Sunday Times
The supply side of the music industry is struggling with the technology requirements of becoming a digital industry. The era of streaming and transactional licensing has caused the volume of data flowing between stakeholders to rise at an incredible rate.
Source: The META Network: Lowering the barriers for developers in the music industry
Every music company in 2017 is facing the challenge of making sense of a torrent of data from streaming services and social networks, among other sources. How to make the most of it?
Source: Music data and analytics: digging below the surface trends
The RightsXchange (TRX), the online TV rights portal created by Matthew and David Frank, is opening for business today with the entire BBC Worldwide catalogue added to its platform. The global launch of TRX follows the completion of an 18-month beta phase.
Arena Music first started testing royalty payments in Bitcoin for artists in Phoenix and in Atlanta. According to Arena founder and CEO Damon Evans, bitcoin technology “forces a level of transparency and fairness in reporting and payouts.” Thus, cryptocurrency will eliminate the music industry’s “black box.”
Source: Streaming Service Guarantees Artists $0.01 Per Stream – In Bitcoin
Estimates from DECENT, a Swiss-based blockchain start-up that early this October launched a live beta test of DECENT GO, touted as a “Google Play-like digital marketplace” built on top of a blockchain-based platform, writers lose anywhere between “30% and 75% of their profits” when publishing with Amazon.
Source: Can Blockchain Challenge Content Platform Giants’ Facebook & YouTube Domination?
Over the past six months, technologists have come to believe that blockchain—a version of the technology that brought us bitcoin—can be used to build entirely new kinds of networked platforms, and these platforms can be embedded with incentives that could suck users, developers and partners out of the massive orbits of Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon.
Source: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google Could Be Toppled by Blockchain
In an amicus brief filed Wednesday (read here), the government urges the appeals court to hold that a copyright owner’s exclusive right to control performance is infringed “just as clearly when the transmission comprising the unauthorized performance originates oversees,” that is, when there’s an audience in the United States who is able to receive it.
American Library Association (ALA) President Jim Neal this week announced the launch of the ALA Policy Corps, an initiative that seeks to draw on the expertise within the library community to work on the many policy initiatives that affect libraries.
Previously, the Mixcloud operated under statutory digital broadcast licences. Direct deals with labels enables the addition of subscriptions to individual creator channels and a more interactive listening experience.
Source: Mixcloud Signs Landmark WMG Direct Licensing Deal For Curated Audio Streaming – hypebot