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SoundExchange Debuts Search Tool for Song Codes

Need to find an important piece of metadata for a particular recording? SoundExchange has announced the launch of an online tool for looking up the ISRCs, or International Standard Recording Codes, related to the nearly 20 million recordings in its database. ISRC is the standard for identifying sound recordings. Countries have their own ISRC agency that assign the unique numbers.

Each number is comprised of a two-letter country code, a three-character code for the registrant, two numbers for the year, and five numbers assigned by the registrant. The RIAA oversees the ISRC system in the United States and its territories. The IFPI oversees ISRCs globally.A correct ISRC helps ensure the correct label or artist is paid a performance royalty when the recording is streamed by webcasters such as Pandora and satellite radio service SiriusXM Radio.

At any given time, SoundExchange has tens of millions of dollars in undistributed royalties because it has received inaccurate or incomplete data from a service.

Source: Billboard

NBC Changes Contract to Adam Levine’s ‘Songland’ After Claim of Rights Overreach

NBC dialed back the rights it is claiming for applicants to Adam Levine‘s new songwriting competition, “Songland,” in the wake of a Wrap story that pointed out overreaching with potential contestants.

The words “if I am selected to be a participant on the Program” were added to the submission application signed by songwriters vying to be on the show after TheWrap published a story on Saturday pointing out that the network was claiming royalty rights for all submissions, whether or not they became contestants.

Source: The Wrap

Would ‘100 Percent Licensing’ Unshackle the Market for Music, or Make it Worse?

As we’ve covered in recent months here at the R Street Institute, the U.S. Justice Department is in the midst of its review (and possible modification) of the agreements (called “consent decrees”) that govern the operation of the nation’s two leading performance rights organizations (PROs).

These groups – the American Society of Composers and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI) – are responsible for collecting and distributing royalties from the performance of musical compositions under copyright.

The agreements place restrictions – originating from antitrust concerns, on the one hand, and fear of heavy-handed regulation, on the other – on the two entities’ operations, through which the vast majority of our nation’s musical works are licensed. While no one would describe this system as an inherently good or logical one, it’s important to weigh how any modifications would affect the tenuous balance currently in place.

Source: R Street

Paramount Pictures Puts Hundreds of Full Movies on YouTube for Free

As the music business continues to question the value coming back to rights-holders from YouTube, the movie industry just made a historic pact with the Google-owned giant.

Paramount Pictures has launched a new channel on YouTube that allows users to watch hundreds of licensed movies, in full, for free.

As you might expect, there aren’t too many classics within the trove.

Why has Paramount – a subsidiary of MTV owner Viacom – taken this step? No doubt to capture some advertising revenue from an assortment of films which would otherwise go unwatched.

Source: Music Business Worldwide

We Can Work It Out: How Brands Can Master Music Rights

If a picture paints a thousand words, then a well-placed soundtrack can bring those visuals to life and create a lasting emotional connection.

Think of the use of The Velvet Underground’s malevolent Venus in Furs in a Dunlop TV spot for tyres. At the other end of the musical spectrum, soft and gentle cover versions by Lily Allen and Aurora are likely to become forever synonymous with Christmas, gifts and John Lewis.

However, if music appears to be an easy win for advertisers, this overlooks the complexities of what goes on beneath the surface, where the music rights business can often jeopardise the creative ambitions of even the best marketers.

Many brand teams fall in love with one song, for example, and are held to ransom on commercial terms. That or a they’re forced to accept restrictive licences that lack the permissions needed for the rollout of their global campaign.

From my experience brokering deals for brands, this disconnect is frequently the result of poor planning and leaving the licensing process to the last minute. However, it need not be a nightmare.

Source: The Guardian

Monetizing Mobile Gaming

The mobile gaming industry made $29 billion in 2015 — and it is only set to continue growing (with estimates as high as $49 billion by 2018).

But the mobile gaming industry is in the “wild west” phase of its history right now, with the constant improvement of mobile devices and so many variables to successful monetization. Though it’s difficult to know exactly what mobile will be like in a few years, here’s what I see influencing the mobile gaming space in 2016.

Source: TechCrunch

Imagem Allies with Chinese Distributor, as New Online Content Rules Loom in China

Independent 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

The Coming Fight: Why the Next CBA Won’t Be So Easy

baseball-2There’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

Gaming on the Blockchain II – A New Kind of Digital Ownership

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

Microsoft Certifies Ethereum Offering in Blockchain Service First

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

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