In
dependent music publisher Imagem has signed a deal with Chinese digital distribution firm R2G, which will see the distributor handle the licensing of the publisher’s repertoire in the Chinese market. Imagem is the latest music firm to ally with a Chinese partner in a bid to access royalties now being paid by various digital music set-ups in the country.
Source: Complete Music Update
There’s no question that baseball has been at the forefront of pushing technological advances, and its app has been the highest grossing sports application in the Apple ecosystem for six consecutive years.
But when Baer and others talk about MLB’s opportunity in digital, they aren’t just talking about the opportunity to separate consumers from $20 for a mobile app, or $140 for an MLB.tv subscription; they’re talking about the opportunity to turn their first-mover advantage into a business that profits from other companies attempting to get up and running in the digital streaming environment.
Over the last two years, MLB has pushed heavily in this direction.
Last August, MLB struck a deal with the National Hockey League that signaled an even more aggressive direction for its digital division. Instead of simply being a technology partner, MLB acquired the NHL’s digital streaming rights, paying $100 million per year for ownership of the hockey league’s digital broadcast rights, making MLB a full-on rights-holder.
That agreement signaled that Major League Baseball expects to be a player in the market providing live sports (besides just baseball) to the cord-cutting generation. The NHL deal gives MLB three sports—already cemented was an agreement with the PGA to provide early-round coverage of events, since traditional networks cover only the weekends—that it theoretically could package together in a bundle, and positions MLB to become a supplemental option for the Netflix crowd.
Source: The Hardball Times
With a bunch of new platforms poised to launch and some existing ones making money hand over fist, the gaming and blockchain ecosystem would appear to be happening.
Part one of this series looked at the revolutionary token-based platform FreeMyVunk and the self-styled overlord of high value digital assets, Jon Neverdie Jacobs.
This part looks at more offerings in the space and delves deeper into the question of digital asset ownership. Decentralisation is heralding a new era for gamers trading digital assets using tokens, or smart contracts on a the tamper-proof Ethereum public blockchain, for instance.
The effect is transparency in what was considered to be a permanently grey market, fought over for years by the likes of Brock Pierce’s Internet Gaming Entertainment.
A brave new blockchain-enabled gaming universe ushers in new paradigms of digital ownership, and a rising tide of decentralised platforms threatens to engulf any digital item with transferable value. How will markets not controlled by any single entity play out with big incumbents?
Source: IBT
BlockApps, a startup providing Ethereum blockchain software for enterprises, has become the first certified offering on Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) marketplace. With its latest post, Microsoft also announced that asset exchange provider AlphaPoint and Internet-of-Things micropayments startup IOTA have joined its Azure BaaS platform.
Source: CoinDesk
I could never have imagined that the article I wrote would have the impact that it has, and I am humbled, stunned, and excited by the outpouring of interest and support that has come my way.
In the short time since it came out, I have been overwhelmed by offers to speak publicly, offers of help and even offers to fund “what you are building.”
So I need to be clear here before we begin: this is not something that I am building. I am the CEO of an amazing company PledgeMusic whose amazing women and men solve what I refer to as the “first mile” problem of the music industry, by eliminating risk, creating engagement and giving artists both money and data to go off and make their music. In short, we help create the rights that the proposed .bc (or dotblockchain) format seeks to codify.
This is a full time job, and it is one that I love deeply. The “last mile” problem, which is the one that this project seeks to solve, is something that I care so very deeply about but that I could not solve on my own (even if I didn’t have a job already). This needs to be solved by all of us, an industry-wide initiative to fix the very problems that we created. I will do all that I can — mornings, lunches, nights and weekends — to advocate for it, but it’s not one person’s job. It’s our job, and that includes you who are reading this.
Source: Cuepoint
Imagi
ne a company or service that isn’t controlled by any single individual, board or other central entity.
Known as a , or ‘dapp’ for short, the concept has been one of the more novel ideas to emerge from the blockchain community. Armed with self-executing smart contracts, proponents of the technology have envisioned ways to replace everything that today requires a centralized leadership, from businesses and services to governments.
In some ways, bitcoin could be considered the first dapp, as it is fully open-source, rewards contributors, runs without a central authority and uses blockchain technology to help facilitate its continued use case as an online currency.
Source: CoinDesk
Global professiona
l services giant PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) became the latest big-name firm to make its blockchain service offerings public this month, unveiling a solution portfolio designed to take business clients from ideation to iteration as they explore the emerging technology.
The PwC Blockchain Solution Portfolio, a suite of 12 services aimed at spanning the cycle of analysis ongoing at major financial firms, features elements focused on education, evaluation and, ultimately, fostering collaboration between PwC clients and industry partners.
Source: CoinDesk
One of the bigg
est, still-dormant use cases for blockchain technology is in the field of media – the overarching term capturing a slew of creative professions whose traditional business models have been upended by lightning-fast digital file replication.
Across various fields, the problems are clear: writers, photographers and musicians lack the ability to prove and protect ownership of their works and ideas, a prospect that renders monetization in a digital environment difficult.In the face of this challenge, blockchain tech, with its ability to provide provenance, identity and micropayments has emerged as a potential antidote.
One of the more unique projects innovating in this area is Mediachain, a newly launched metadata protocol that allows digital creators to attach information to their creative works, timestamp that data to the bitcoin blockchain and store it with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), a distributed file system incorporating aspects of blockchain technology.
Source: CoinDesk
Rumblefish, the nation’s leading provider of rights management solutions for the music industry, has entered into an agreement with Digitally Imported, the premier online radio destination for electronic music fans around the world. Rumblefish, recently merged with The Harry Fox Agency’s (HFA) Slingshot rights management service, will streamline Digitally Imported licensing and royalty processes, in support of its music streaming business model.
Tapping Rumblefish allows Digitally Imported to focus on creating an unparalleled listening experience by eliminating the need to manage thousands of licensing relationships, manage copyright administration staff and program complex royalty formulas.
Digitally Imported will rely on Rumblefish for its U.S. interactive streaming licensing needs, including the royalty calculations, statements and distributions.
You need something nuanced yet epic, and with the quality of a symphonic Rachel Portman.
Also, it needs to be licensed commercially. Oh, and did you mention you’re on a super tight budget? Familiar with this quandary, filmmaker Ira Belsky co-founded Art-List, a new subscription-based music licensing platform for independent filmmakers, offering you all the music you want for a yearly flat fee.
Catering to the world of independent filmmakers constantly in need of music that’s neither too MIDI nor too expensive, the subscription idea behind the Art-List sounds pretty enticing. Instead of a licensing fee per song, there is a yearly fee of $199 that gives get unlimited access to everything in the Art-List catalogue, which as of right now has around 1000 songs.
Considering you can often pay $100 to license a single high quality song, this could be a great resource. And having a subscription based model with no restrictions on how (and how often) you can use the tracks is a winning proposition for video professionals who are regularly producing content that needs music.
Source: NFS