Collecting royalties may soon become more efficient for Canadian musicians, as two of the country’s biggest music rights agencies agreed to consolidate this week, hoping to put more money in the pockets of Canada’s favourite songwriters and their publishers in the hard-to-get-by digital era.
Source: SOCAN acquires Montreal rights agency SODRAC in bid to deliver better returns
Civil, the blockchain-based journalism organization, is casting its eye to Asia after it set up a $1 million fund that’s aimed at seeding 100 new media projects across the continent over the next three years. The organization has teamed up with Splice, a Singapore-based media startup which will manage the fund.
Source: Blockchain media project Civil turns to Asia with fund to kickstart 100 new media ventures
U.S.-Israeli digital music store eMusic said on Tuesday it plans to raise $70 million to build a blockchain-based music distribution and royalty management platform to ensure artists and service providers get a fair share of revenues.
Source: eMusic seeks to raise $70 million for blockchain music platform
DotBlockchain has signed a partnership with payments and metadata company Exactuals in order to verify the metadata that it intends to input onto its database, aiming to begin with the most accurate accounting of rights ownership it can muster ahead of a forthcoming launch. Exactuals’ RAI software allows for music companies to input and correct data for song recording metadata, and add additional information where required.
Source: DotBlockchain Partners With Exactuals In Effort to Clear Up Music’s Data Problem
The US company, which collects these digital performance royalties on behalf of recorded music rights-holders, distributed $208.7m to its members in Q2 2018 (the three months to end of June). That was 17.5% up on the $177.6m distributed in the same period of 2017.
Source: SoundExchange paid out $399m to artists and labels in the first half of 2018, up 17.4% year-on-year
YouTube is already tweaking its model, opening the paywall a crack in a bid to attract more subscribers. The premium, paid nature of the service means consumers increasingly expect longer-form content, YouTube programming chief Susanne Daniels says, so going forward more YouTube originals will be 20 minutes or longer in length.
Source: Digital News Daily: YouTube Premium Cracks Open Its Paywall
For years, the common wisdom about robots was that they’re taking over repetitive, routine jobs. But at least they’re not creative. We’ll always have art and music to ourselves, right? Wrong. Douglas Eck works at Google. He created the Magenta project, dedicated to using artificial intelligence, or AI, to make art and music. Eck is using a form of AI called Machine Learning. His software analyzed thousands of sketches done by people; and now, it knows how to complete a drawing itself.
The Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) and the Madrid School of Telecommunications Engineering (ETSIT-UPM) announced July 26 a research partnership into implementing blockchain for copyright management in the digital era.
Source: Two Major Spanish Public Institutions to Research Blockchain for Copyright Management
The Blockchain Poetry Auction is a collaboration between CoinFund, a prominent crypto-asset focused investment firm based in Brooklyn, NY, anduniqx.io, a London-based software development company building UNIQX, a decentralized marketplace for the ownership and trading of digital assets.
Source: World’s First Blockchain Poetry Auction Created at NIFTY Hackathon
Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Lynn, Masterworks is building a blockchain-based stock trading platform for significant works of art. Now 38 years old, Lynn started collecting modern art when he was only 19. His collection is valued at over $100 million, and he sees this venture as a way to democratize access to iconic pieces of art.
Source: Masterworks offers fractional ownership of fine art through the blockchain