June, 2018

From Blonde to Drake’s Views (another Apple Music exclusive) to, yes, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, releases initially exclusive to a single platform have triggered corresponding spikes in illegal downloading. In the most twisted example of exclusives gone wrong, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo was not only voraciously pirated but is now embroiled in a lawsuit because Kanye tweeted that the record would remain a Tidal exclusive.

Source: Beyoncé and JAY-Z’s Piracy Problem

The fight to raise artists’ royalties on various streaming platforms has gained serious traction. Korean music streaming services like MNet and Melon are going to start paying higher artist royalties — thanks to a newly-issued government edict.

Source: Korean Artists Just Got a Pay Raise from Music Streaming Services

At least 10 popular Twitch gamers have been kicked off  the Twitch streaming platform for 24 hours affter allegingedly  playing copyrighted music during their streams, and all of the complaints appear to come from a single source.

Source: Top Twitch Gamers Suspended Over Copyrighted Music

The unified digital distribution service delivers music to services including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play and Deezer, enabling artists to manage their assets from a single platform. The service collects and distributes 100% of the royalties from streaming and downloads directly to artists and any other participating rights-holders.

Source: Songtradr launches unified digital distribution service and metadata offering

The need for ways to weed out Deepfakes has attracted a new $8 million round for Truepic. The cash comes from untraditional startup investors, including Dowling Capital Partners, former Thomson Financial (which become Reuters) CEO Jeffrey Parker, Harvard Business school professor William Sahlman and more. The Series A brings Truepic to $10.5 million in funding.

Source: Truepic raises $8M to expose Deepfakes, verify photos for Reddit

A California-based data analytics company didn’t violate the law when it stripped out metadata from copyrighted photos used in real estate listings, a federal appeals court ruled. Two photographers who sued CoreLogic Inc. failed to prove the company’s actions would enable or help conceal copyright infringement, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said.

Source: CoreLogic’s Copyright Win in Photo Metadata Spat Affirmed

TaTaTu Enterprises Ltd., a blockchain-based video startup that rewards users for watching and sharing videos, claims it has raised $575 million via an initial coin offering of TTU, making it the third-largest ICO on record behind Telegram and Block.one.

Source: Blockchain-based video startup TaTaTu claims to have raised $575M in initial coin offering

A new Australian start-up that intends to use blockchain technology to prove art provenance and enable trading, has signed up some of the country’s best independent galleries, art dealers and collectors, including Tim Olsen of the famed Olsen family, ahead of an anticipated launch later this year.

Source: Big names sign up for ArtChain as it looks to blockchain to end art forgery

Console makers like Microsoft pay royalties to publishers, but those calculations were difficult to process beforehand. Shockingly enough, Microsoft used a manual method that relied on spreadsheets. Unfortunately, this process usually took 45 days and many smaller publishers didn’t understand it.

Source: Microsoft uses blockchain to quickly send royalty data to game publishers

YouTube announced several new features out of VidCon today that will shake up the way midsized creators monetize. In particular, it announced a Premieres feature, which will let creators prerecord videos for their live streams. This allows creators to focus on things like answering live chat questions while the prerecorded video is playing.

Sources: YouTube will not let creators play prerecorded videos during live streams