Microsoft Moving Beyond Bitcoin To Create Blockchain Marketplace On Azure Cloud

At the end of 2014, Microsoft announced plans to integrate the cryptocurrency bitcoin — at the time experiencing an unprecedented surge in value — into its Windows and Xbox payments system. The news caused the price of bitcoin to surge, but the initiative never really gained widespread support. Microsoft is now looking beyond bitcoin, however, and trying to create a marketplace for the blockchain, the distributed ledger technology on which bitcoin is built.

While bitcoin may have grabbed the headlines with its wildly fluctuating value and its mysterious creator, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, it is blockchain that is seen as the real innovation. On Monday, IBM announced it would put major resources into helping its customers to develop apps built on the blockchain, and Microsoft is also eager to gain an advantage over competitors by building what it calls a “certified blockchain marketplace” on its Azure cloud platform.

Source: IBT

Blockchain: Catalyst for Massive Change Across Industries

Blockchain, the technology underlying the digital currency Bitcoin, has sparked intense interest across industries from banking and trading to agriculture and music. Large-scale deployment of the technology, a digital ledger of identifies and transactions, could be years away. Yet the level of commitment to testing and development, especially in financial services, shows how seriously blockchain is viewed in the corporate world.

The power of blockchain lies, advocates say, in its inherent security, which can establish trust directly among parties in a transaction, making it possible to remove the middlemen that currently serve that function. Entire industries, such as clearinghouses in financial trading or title-search firms in real estate, conceivably could be displaced, slashing costs and cutting the time required to complete a transaction. The impact, they say, could be massive.

Source: WSJ

MUSE: Leveraging Blockchain Technology To Revolutionize Music Industry

While growing interest in blockchain technology from companies to governments shows little sign of abating and even the Chinese authorities are looking to create their own digital currency, the power of this technology is also being harnessed for deployment in other industries – including music.

Now fintech platform OpenLedger and Danish bitcoin exchange CCEDK are joining forces with MUSE, a music-tailored blockchain, to make monetizing music as easy as new peer-to-peer (P2P) platforms made distributing it 15 years ago.Just as music distribution was ripe for disruption back then with the rise of P2P file-sharing platforms, so blockchain technology is now offering new opportunities for its monetization.

Source: Forbes

Intellectual Property Issues in Film & Interactive Media

money-e-commerce-billboard-650“Content is king” may be an overused phrase in today’s media world, but the kind is more powerful than ever before, and the palace rules are changing. These days, content users and creators must navigate an ever-growing Web of intellectual property (IP) issues.Specifically, the interactive nature of the media content creation process has had a dramatic effect on IP rights of the participants.

Recently, significant changes in the nature of media content creation, content delivery methods, and celebrity status have contributed to shifts in the way content is created and monetized.Three IP leaders in the legal industry sat down with Inside Counsel to explore practical ways for companies to protect themselves in today’s rapidly changing media landscape.

Source: Inside Counsel

Three Startups Trying to Transform the Music Industry Using the Blockchain

Music was once scarce. Before the days of MP3 and P2P file sharing, you didn’t have the ability to hear songs whenever you wished unless you bought them.

Today one does not even need to download songs, as platforms such as VEVO and YouTube host many of the most popular songs of yesterday and today.

The industry was faced with a definitive problem in an age of liberal copy and distribution technology: finding new ways to monetize digital music files that lacked scarcity.

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.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

Benji Rogers and Imogen Heap: Building the Music Blockchain

Music-Industry

Aren’t its most powerful members – the three major labels – exactly the kind of companies who have most to lose from an all-new, uber-transparent system of tracking music rights and paying for usage?

Maybe. Which is certainly one reason for being curious about how such a system would work. But the early evangelists for such a system – notably PledgeMusic founder Benji Rogers, argue that the blockchain would enhance the businesses of the BPI’s members, rather than destroy them.

That’s why the BPI invited Rogers in on a windy Monday evening for the first in a planned series of “thought-leadership events” tackling big topics and new technologies.

Source: Music Ally

How the Blockchain and VR Can Change the Music Industry

The majority of the critical issues cited by music industry experts stem from a few sources, but a key problem area falls within transparency and clarity of ownership data, or metadata to be precise.

Metadata in this case is the basic info that is needed to identify who wrote, performed, and owns the music that you listen to every day.

This data and its accuracy are a vital means to ensure that creators and owners get paid for their work when their music is used.Whether it is streamed online, broadcast in a coffee shop, licensed for a TV show, or played on an iPad, this data is the underpinning key or map, if you will, that leads back (in theory) to those who created and/or are invested in that musical work. It sounds like a simple thing to deal with in 2015. Just track all plays, and then pay who is owed for their work. But it’s not that simple.

Source: Medium

Bitcoin for Rockstars

There is an incredibly boring problem in the music industry for which Bitcoin offers a potentially fascinating solution. In fact, I think this might be one of the coolest and most immediately worthwhile applications of distributed ledger and payment network technologies such as Bitcoin.

Source: Backchannel

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