Spotify Inks “No Copyright Claim” Royalty Deal with Music Publishers

money-protest-power-fist-biz-2015-billboard-650Spotify has agreed to do a better job at allowing music publishers and songwriters to claim and receive royalties from the streaming service. However there’s a caveat: to strike the settlement deal with Spotify, copyright holders cannot make an infringement claim against the company.

In recent months, Spotify has faced a number of lawsuits from musicians who have challenged the Sweden-based firm’s alleged failure to licence artists’ works before making them available for streaming.

On Thursday, US trade body the National Music Publishers’ Association said that the settlement deal it had struck with Spotify represented a “landmark industry agreement.”

Source: Ars Technica UK

Does Blockchain Hold the Key to Music’s Future?

A song doesn’t just happen. There are composers, lyricists, performers. Rights of ownership are divvied up across those parties, labels, publishers, distributors and possibly other entities. And the sale of one company to another means a small forest worth of paperwork to keep the records current and ensure all parties are properly paid for their work.

What if there were an easier way, one that not only allowed all the rights and ownership privileges of a song to remain together in an open, publicly readable and researchable database, but also gave artists the ability to post their song directly and collect payment every time a download or album was sold?Welcome to the world of blockchain.

Source: A Journal of Musical Things

Could a Blockchain-Based Registry Ever Replace the Copyright Office?

Blockchaicopyrightn technology opens up the possibility for a provider to offer an immutable registry of transactions, held on a decentralized network of computers.

While financial applications continue to dominate the blockchain development landscape, as we’ve detailed in prior posts there are a growing number of companies offering registries for digital content, including Monegraph, ConSensys, Stem, Mediachain, ascribe and others.

A content registry, for the most part, is a registry of the ownership of intellectual property, most prominently copyright. Ideally, such a registry would accurately record original ownership of a work, and then also record all subsequent transactions involving that work. Since copyright interests are divisible, this can become an extremely complicated tree of transactions, very rapidly.

Source: JDSupra

The Key to Blockchain Adoption: Make It Cheaper

An awareness is dawning in the industry that blockchain—the technology behind (really, interwoven with) BitCoin—is the main story. BitCoin is almost a distraction, a sideshow to the real deal. Most people have heard of BitCoin, the “cryptocurrency.” In simple terms, BitCoin is value that resides in computer networks. It seems to be mysteriously reliable, partly because it is verified by multiple parties.

Source: Techonomy

Apple Music, Dubset Partner to Stream Previously Unlicensed Remixes and DJ Mixes

Dubset Media Holdings has announced a partnership that will allow Apple Music to stream remixes and DJ mixes that had previous been absent from licensed services due to copyright issues.

Thousands upon thousands cool mash-ups and hour-long mixes have effectively been pulled out of the underground and placed onto the world’s second-largest music subscription service. Dubset is a digital distributor that delivers content to digital music services. But unlike other digital distributors, Dubset will use a proprietary technology called MixBank to analyze a remix or long-form DJ mix file, identify recordings inside the file, and properly pay both record labels and music publishers.

Source: Billboard

Can BitTeaser’s Blockchain Ads Network Disrupt ‘Pay-Per-Click’ Market?

Advertising is indexbig business and as increasing activity moves online, so too do the marketing dollars. While 2015 saw an estimated $170.5 billion (bn) spent on online advertising globally, this figure is projected to mushroom almost 50% by 2018 to $252bn. But can anyone apart from the big guys snap up a slice of this lucrative business and leverage the Internet of Things to achieve it?

Until recently only the big players were able to get into it. Software though has made it possible for some webmasters to serve adverts and generate revenues based on their own traffic. Yet profiting from the advertising sector more broadly was a complex undertaking out of reach to the ordinary punter and investor.

Now to solve the problem, a group of future tech innovators from Denmark and the US have used the power of ‘peer-to-peer’ platforms to throw the doors open to everyone. Effectively they are offering anyone who wants it a piece of a pie that isn’t getting smaller any time soon.

Source: Forbes

Bad Data Is The Worm In The Apple For Streaming Music

2016 is proving to be tricky year for streaming rights. No sooner did it start to look like artists and labels were beginning to feel comfortable with streaming then along come a veritable flood of songwriter class action suits in the US, against TIDAL, Rhapsody and Spotify, twice.

At the heart of the legal action is the issue of streaming services not paying mechanical rights to songwriters because they have not identified and / or not been able to identify, all of the the songwriters.

The streaming services counter that they a) have been adhering to the rules as they stand and b) that it is difficult / impossible for them to track everything. It is a complex issue that may even have some of its underlying assumptions turned upside down (in favour of streaming services). For a good introduction to the issues see this balanced MusicAlly piece. Whatever the legal intricacies though, there is a crucial underling issue: bad data.

Or, to be more precise, a complete lack of data.

International music licensing is highly complex and anyone who tries to tell you differently is either wrong or lying. That is not to suggest for a moment that music services should somehow not have an obligation to invest time, effort and resource into licensing music, far from it. But it does mean that the current system is not fit for purpose.

Source: MIDiA Research

Three Things the Music Industry Should Learn from Bitcoin about Disruption

The music industry is about to change.

Everyone knows it.

Applied blockchain cryptography and new virtual reality systems are about to change digital entertainment more radically than what portable digital music players and streaming content platforms have in the last 20 years. I’ve been involved in the tech industry since the late 90’s.

I saw, participated in, and profited from the tech bubble of the first decade of this century, mostly as a developer. I’ve been involved with Bitcoin and blockchain development since 2013. I have been on the vanguard of the disruption as it rippled through the financial sector, and for the last two years I’ve been working with various entities within the music industry to educate and prepare them for the coming of blockchain cryptography.

From the sum total of those experiences, I think there’s three things of which the music industry should take note on the eve of its own disruption

Source: ZapChain

Blockai Uses the Blockchain to Help Artists Protect Their Intellectual Property

While most of the discussions around blockchain have focused on its potential use in finance, startup Blockai is looking at something different — helping artists, photographers and other creators register their work so that they can protect it from potential copyright infringement.

CEO Nathan Lands is pitching this as an intermediate step between registering your work with the Library of Congress and doing nothing. Technically, your work is copyrighted as soon as you create the novel, drawing or whatever. However, registration is required if you want to sue someone for infringement.

Source: TechCrunch

Between Rock and a Database: Streaming Services, Artists and Music Publishers Are Colliding

Streaming services say that they can’t identify or find some songwriters in order to pay them.

That may be true — although Lowery can be found easily enough online — but the Copyright Act requires streaming services to get a mechanical license before they use a song. Indeed, in the event that Lowery’s case goes to trial, Spotify’s decision to set aside money for future royalty payments could potentially demonstrate either that the company has been acting in good faith or that it knew it did not have mechanical licenses for at least some of the songs it was streaming.

“The law is pretty black and white,” says Donald Passman, a veteran music business lawyer and the author of All You Need to Know About the Music Business. “If you’re using someone’s songs, you have to pay them.”

Rather than argue these cases in court, streaming services will probably try to prevent classes from being certified — Spotify already filed a motion to dismiss Lowery’s case on jurisdictional grounds. The high cost of federal litigation would make it impractical for the vast majority of songwriters to pursue legal action on their own.

Source: Billboard

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