A number of top international film and music bodies have sent an open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa, warning about the impact of South Africa’s new copyright bill. The letter asks that Ramaphosa take the bill back to parliament for a ‘proper, sector-specific impact assessment and meaningful consultation with affected stakeholders’.
Source: Major global film and music studios have sent a letter of warning to Ramaphosa – here’s what it said
DVD subscriptions are still highly profitable for the company: In Q2 of 2019, physical disc shipments contributed close to $46 million in profits to the company’s bottom line. That sizable profit explains why the company is keeping the DVD mailing service up and running for the time being.
Source: Netflix Has Now Shipped 5 Billion DVDs to Its Members
The deals that Tencent Music Entertainment has with record labels are under investigation by the State Administration for Market Regulation, China’s antitrust authority. The probe could end the exclusive licensing deals that Tencent has with Sony Music, UMG, WMG and others.
Source: Tencent Music Label Deals Probed By Chinese Regulators
As of this past weekend, independent artists can now use DistroKid to get their music onto the TikTok platform. Effective immediately, TikTok is now simply another option for uploading artists. DistroKid founder Philip Kaplan says indie artists have been asking for TikTok integration for months. Distrokid looks like the first indie music distribution platform to offer support for the emerging platform.
Musicians regularly and understandably complain about 0the payments they receive from streaming music services and release stats to prove they’ve been wronged. Too often, however, the numbers are incomplete or fail to include the publishers, labels, etc. – that can reduce what the artist finally receives.
Producer Samuel Nicholas III — aka Sam Scully — filed a federal lawsuit in Louisiana against superstar rapper Drake this week. Drake, alongside various collaborators and several record labels, is accused of copyright infringement for sampling one of Nicholas’ beats that was allegedly used in two songs.
The decentralization of applications and services is one of the driving concepts of the markets and commercial environments that will be established with the emergence of blockchain technology. But there is a second crucial shift that has been caused by blockchain technology: by presenting an entirely new way of dealing with algorithmic validation of peer-to-peer transactions, Bitcoin introduced the concepts of scarcity and value to the digital world!
Source: Decentralization and Scarcity — Blockchain and the Cultural Industries
The advantages of blockchain as an immutable ledger and their decentralized nature which makes them accessible from anywhere by anyone with the right set of credentials is ideal for creating a global art registry, with high security, scalability and of course with some extra work, great usability.
Source: Blockchain for Art: DLT Makes Inroads into the Art Industry | NewsBTC
One of the world’s biggest streaming holdouts has finally embraced the format’s takeover of the music business. Taylor Swift, who has held back previous albums from music-streaming services during their initial release—offering them only for physical and digital sale for at least their first few weeks—began offering her seventh studio album, “Lover,” directly on Spotify and other streaming services Friday.
Source: Taylor Swift to Streaming Services: Look What You Made Me Do
Publishers are taking issue with Audible’s new Captions feature, introduced last month. The feature uses machine learning to transcribe spoken words into written ones, so users can read along while they listen to an audiobook. The issue, however, is that Audible is doing this based on audiobook recordings, which have separate licenses to physical books and ebooks.
Source: Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speech-to-text feature