Bitcoin’s Database Now Powers Monegraph, a Digital Art Marketplace

Digital artwork, from digital music to fine art, has been a growing area for a while now.

If a work is infinitely reproducible at no cost, however, how can a collector establish that they have an original or one of an edition? Monegraph takes advantage of the bitcoin database, the block chain, to log each transfer of a work (just as the database does for bitcoin), so that it really is set in stone who owns a digital piece at each moment.“It’s not about stopping piracy.

It’s about facilitating legitimate commerce,” Kevin McCoy, co-founder and CEO of Monegraph, told the Observer in an interview before the night’s presentations. He pointed to iTunes as an example of a marketplace for digital music.

He said people might have their complaints about how Apple did it, but it was a way for people to know they were purchasing authorized work. There hadn’t been a good way to do that before.

Once there was, people did it.

Source: Observer

Three Startups Trying to Transform the Music Industry Using the Blockchain

A gang of computer programmers – united by the Bitcoin technology – are trying to revolutionize an industry after 15 years of disruption which began with Napster and was cemented by BitTorrent.

Bitcoin’s blockchain – a decentralized system powered by a network of computers – serves as the transparent backbone of the Bitcoin network. The blockchain, which functions as a public ledger, maintains the accounting of the Bitcoin network, timestamping each transaction and assigning a unique ID.

Numerous individuals and companies are excited about the future of the blockchain and the music industry. Three companies, PeerTracks, Bittunes and Ujo Music, each claim their business model will liberate musicians from being under the thumbs of overbearing music labels and streaming services.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

This Company Thinks It Can Turn Music Pirates Into Paying Customers

The music business has traditionally taken a hard-line approach to online music pirates.

Once upon a time, of course, it sued them directly – but that didn’t work out too well for anyone. These days, the general consensus at rights-holders is that a stern but educative series of warnings from a user’s ISP is the best route to stopping individual infringers – whilst simultaneously forcing broadband providers to block torrent sites in the courts.

But could there be another, kinder approach? Is the music business missing out on revenues by trying to warn, rather than directly convert, torrent site users online?

Content protection and data-analytics solutions specialist MUSO believes so.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

Video Could Save the Radio Star

Every artist should take a full inventory of themselves and their image, and then figure out how to monetize it.

They are missing huge opportunities if they don’t engage with the brands they love publicly, no matter how indie those brands might be.

In fact, indie brands are probably better — it’s a heck of a lot harder to strike a deal with Budwieser than it is to do something cool with a local brewery, and it feels more authentic in the end. It won’t pay the big bucks, but it’s a nice supplemental income and benefits all parties involved. If you’re an artist with great fashion sense, pair up with local indie designers and get some affiliate deals going.

Like food and have a particular take a cuisine — there are already a ton of those shows, but maybe a fresh spin will draw people in.Making interesting video content available serves all potential audiences — super fans will subscribe and consume everything, and casual fans can engage in a different way. The audio simply isn’t enough anymore — the video needs to be a key component of any artist’s career as well.

Source: Medium

Yelp Agrees to License Its Data to Sprinklr, All the Better for Marketers to Understand Their Consumers

Yelp SprinklrLogohas agreed to license data and reviews to Sprinklr, a company that helps marketers track what consumers say about them on digital platforms.

Marketers such as McDonald’s or Olive Garden, for example, use Sprinklr to see what customers are saying about them in a variety of venues, such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WeChat and more, all on a location basis. Other Sprinklr clients include Microsoft, Samsung, Nike and Havas.

The addition of Yelp’s extensive data should deepen the offering to marketers, ideally helping them understand what customers like and why they come back in a more precise way.

Source: AdAge

Imogen Heap Wants to Use Blockchain Technology to Revolutionize the Music Industry

The singer’s experiment with “Tiny Human” is the precursor to an entire music eco-system she’s building called “Mycelia,” named after a thread of underground fungus that grows for miles.

Aside from enabling faster, direct payments for artists, Heap wants to create a free platform where musicians have control over the data created by their songs as they circulate among fans and other musicians, including the song’s credits, terms of usage dictated by the artist, where the song is played and when, and any transactions.

This information is tracked using blockchain technology, a method of recording digital transactions first used for Bitcoin.

Source: Quartz

What Happens If SoundCloud Bites the Dust?

SoundCloud’s disappearance would create a powerful ripple effect across the world of recorded music. The most immediate consequence would be the loss of a massive chunk of the world’s independent music available online.

And though there are other sites, most notably Bandcamp, that let anyone upload their music instantly for no fee, they neither have the user base nor the social media aspect that SoundCloud has to develop fans and sales. In fact, many SoundCloud users employ them in tandem, using Bandcamp as a store to sell collections of music, rather than a place to share their latest tracks one-by-one.

Where Bandcamp is the independent music store du jour, SoundCloud is its promoter, employed by musicians to drive awareness and sales.

Source: Digital Trends

Aligning Incentives to Reduce Online Piracy

Last week, the movie industry, as represented by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), announced an agreement with Donuts, operator of the .MOVIE, .THEATRE and .COMPANY domain names, among others, “to help ensure that websites using Donuts-operated top-level domains (TLDs) are not engaged in large-scale piracy.” This agreement is significant in two respects.

First, it aims at perhaps the most important target in terms of combating online copyright infringement: domain names engaged in large-scale piracy. And, second, it illustrates the potential for the increased competition that has developed over the last few years among new entrants into the domain name space to yield innovative new services.

Source: TheHill

Dwolla is Back, But Focused on Blockchain, Not Bitcoin

After a series of mishaps working with bitcoin startups – including the infamous, now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, Dwolla is once again hoping to work as the connector between the emerging technology and traditional financial worlds.

The alternative payment network has been quiet about its foray in the blockchain space, but Ben Milne, Dwolla‘s founder and CEO, says the company is working closely with startups building solutions for tracking assets on the blockchain.

As assets are sent from one blockchain to another or from one business to another, there will have to be a real-world payment in fiat currency to settle that exchange so people can pay their mortgages and purchase other things that can’t be bought with a cryptocurrency or digital assets, Milne contends.

Source: CoinDesk

Kamcord Now Lets Broadcasters Make Money On Its Mobile Game Streaming App

Kamcord, the Y Combinator startup that wants to do to mobile what streaming service Twitch has done to console and PC gaming, has rolled out an important update after it began allowing its most prominent broadcasters to make money on its service.

Twitch, which streamers more video to users per month than even YouTube, grew into a beast that Amazon bought for just shy of $1 billion. The e-commerce firm had to beat off competition from Google, which is working to develop its own game-streaming service, too. While both are focused on desktop PC and console gamers, Kamcord is fixing its gaze on mobile, and mobile only.

Source: TechCrunch

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