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Self-published authors have found a way to actually make money

screenshot-qz.com 2016-06-08 16-13-50As the power of the “Big Five” publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster) in the US ebook market wanes, self-publishing authors have overtaken them in terms of unit sales.

And though Author Earnings shows that in terms of gross dollars made off ebooks, Big Five publishers do better than self-published authors, the site also shows that as a group, self-published authors are taking home more of the pie than those who publish with the Big Five.

Source: Self-published authors have found a way to actually make money — Quartz

Bitcoin, Blockchain and Copyright 

A slew of new companies are betting on a new way to verify ownership of online content: Blockchain. In short, they are using the technology behind Bitcoin to protect and monitor content rather than currency and transactions.

But will this technology really work and will it motivate creators to sign on? The answer is unclear but what is obvious is that, while Blockchain-based solutions do have new capabilities to bring to the table, they also face many of the same challenges as their more centralized counterparts.

Source: Bitcoin, Blockchain and Copyright – Plagiarism Today

Digital Music Era Ushers In New Rights for Veteran Studio Musicians 

harmonicaPaul Harrington, a leading session player on harmonica based in Rockwall, Texas, today announced that after a lengthy quest he has received digital session royalties for the Pitbull track, “Timber,” featuring Ke$ha.

Mr. Harrington was hired in 2013 to record the song’s signature harmonica riff, which kicks off the song and weaves through the entire tune. While he was compensated a meager amount for his time, Mr. Harrington, as with many session players, did not realize that there was money left on the table – a little known royalty owed to session musicians for digital airplay.

Source: Digital Music Era Ushers In New Rights for Veteran Studio Musicians | Business Wire

Putting Hollywood on the Blockchain

screenshot-singulardtv.com 2016-06-07 15-21-38The blockchain is a hot topic in the music business these days, featured on panels at nearly every industry conference and gobbling up acres of paper and pixels in the industry press. But it hasn’t gained nearly as high a profile in the TV and film business.

That’s in part because, while Hollywood has its problems, the film and TV business isn’t nearly as broken as the music business, and movie and TV people are simply not as hungry for radical fixes as many musicians are today. Unlike the music business, where the consumer’s embrace of streaming is blamed for pushing down profit margins and diluting artists’ earnings, the popularity of video streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime has sparked an explosion in scripted TV production and a boom in jobs and pay scales for actors, writers and other behind-the-camera personnel.

Even the major studios, who have watched subscription VOD services erode their once highly profitable DVD business, have benefited from re-selling back catalog to Netflix, Hulu and others.

That doesn’t mean there might not be better ways of doing business, however, or that blockchain won’t play a role in TV’s future. Startup SingularDTV is betting both will happen, in fact, and has set out to prove it.

NeuLion acquires Saffron Digital 

saffron_neulion_7_June_2016NeuLion believes that the combined synergies derived from adding its experience in delivering live TV channels and live sports to the Saffron assets acquisition can transform the over-the-top (OTT) challenges faced by owners and rights holders of sports, entertainment, films and TV channels.

It adds that the combined entity can now reduce project complexities for all content rights holders of existing and new OTT services by decreasing the number of vendors involved in their projects and ‘significantly’ decrease time to market for new OTT and TV everywhere services in comparison to other technology options.

Source: NeuLion acquires Saffron Digital | OTT | News | Rapid TV News

Pandora looks to avoid Spotify’s royalty lawsuits with Music Reports deal 

Pandora, under new CEO Tim Westergren, has announced a new partnership with Music Reports, which it calls “the world’s most advanced rights administration platform”, to manage the mechanical licensing and royalty administration for its upcoming on-demand streaming service.

Spotify was hit by two $150m+ class action lawsuits last year over missing or inaccurate mechanical royalty payments to songwriters – since combined, and ongoing – and later offered a settlement to writers via the NMPA.

Source: Pandora looks to avoid Spotify’s royalty lawsuits with Music Reports deal – Music Business Worldwide

How Spotify Will Battle Taylor Swift 

When the pop superstar decided to pull her entire catalog from Spotify in 2014, citing issues with how the company compensates artists, it looked like a massive blow for the world’s largest paid music streaming service.

More than a year later, Swift’s music is still nowhere to be seen on Spotify. But the streaming service experienced its biggest growth year ever in 2015, adding 29 million active users. There’s no specific star or revolutionary business plan behind this success: In large part, its growth is thanks to the Echo Nest, a music data start-up that Spotify acquired just months before Swift’s exodus. Echo Nest alums have conceived and shepherded virtually every major product update Spotify has rolled out over the last year, from Discover Weekly to its Running mixes. These features, centered on personalization, are part of Spotify’s big bet that crafting killer, user-friendly playlists will keep its followers loyal.

Source: How Spotify Will Battle Taylor Swift — The Ringer

Google’s computers are creating songs. Making music may never be the same.

Google has launched a project to use artificial intelligence to create compelling art and music, offering a reminder of how technology is rapidly changing what it means to be a musician, and what makes us distinctly human.

Google’s Project Magenta, announced Wednesday, aims to push the state of the art in machine intelligence that’s used to generate music and art.

Source: Google’s computers are creating songs. Making music may never be the same. – The Washington Post

Google wanted to buy Michael Jackson’s $750m stake in Sony/ATV 

For many in the music business, the repercussions of Google being allowed to get near a 50% stake Sony/ATV would be deeply worrying. Sony/ATV manages 4m music copyrights written by the likes of The Beatles, Taylor Swift, Michael Jackson, Ed Sheeran, James Brown, Elvis Presley, Lauryn Hill, Oasis and Eminem.

Remember that those 4m copyrights are spread through countless recordings and, therefore, master rights deals with labels. That would have been the first headache for the likes of Universal Music Group.

Source: Google wanted to buy Michael Jackson’s $750m stake in Sony/ATV – Music Business Worldwide

Gideon Greenspan – Four Genuine Blockchain Use Cases 

Almost a year after first releasing MultiChain, we’ve learnt a huge amount about how Blockchains, in a private and non-cryptocurrency sense, can and cannot be applied to real-world problems.

Blockchains are ideal for shared databases in which every user is able toread everything, but no single user controls who can write what. By contrast, in traditional databases, a single entity exerts control over all read and write operations, while other users are entirely subject to that entity’s whims. To sum it up in one sentence: Blockchains represent a trade-off in which disintermediation is gained at the cost of confidentiality.

Source: Gideon Greenspan – Four Genuine Blockchain Use Cases – Blockchain News

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