Data

Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, eBay: How Blockchain Can Break Data Monopolists

Blockchains can be extended beyond the database paradigm towards a general application platform. These platforms work very differently. For example, they have shared virtualized databases, micropayments and consensus mechanisms, from common on-premise or on-cloud platforms that they have the potential to re-implement the named examples while not allowing one party to monopolize the platform.

The main Blockchains like Bitcoin are an example for a distributed autonomous organization. These are organizations centered around code as their ‘constitution’ and have as its main players users, developers, miners (those that render the infrastructure) and evangelists.

Source: Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, eBay: How Blockchain Can Break Data Monopolists

Central music rights database would benefit songwriters

Tim DuBoisToday – in America and globally – the multi-billion-dollar music industry is mired in a Rubik’s Cube of rights administration and royalty payment systems. The current massive multiplayer infrastructure does not serve songwriters, record companies, digital services or consumers.

But what if Congress could ensure that music creators are paid more without increasing music users’ royalty costs? Imagine infringement risks reduced without diminishing creators’ rights. We – an award-winning songwriter and a longtime digital music advocate – believe these benefits are possible, and even probable, if music ownership data is effectively and efficiently collected, validated and utilized by industry stakeholders.

Source: Central music rights database would benefit songwriters

PRS for Music chief talks financials, blockchain and YouTube

Robert-Ashcroft-150x150Ashcroft was keen to talk up the significance of PRS for Music’s investments in back-end technology, from its core systems in the UK to its European joint venture with German and Swedish peers GEMA and STIM. PRS says the number of music ‘uses’ it processed rose from 975bn in 2014 to over 2tn (trillion) in 2015 – a reflection of the deluge of streaming data.

“These are highly-specialised systems. No other business has to store copyright data on the scale that we do, and then the matching of sound recordings reported to us by the DSPs with the songwriters that wrote them,” said Ashcroft.

Source: PRS for Music chief talks financials, blockchain and YouTube

A Surprisingly Interesting Dive Into Classical Music Metadata 

musical scoreDigital service providers (DSPs) have copped a lot of flack for a perceived lack of support for classical music. Some of the criticism has been leveled at the methodologies used to ingest and display classical, which can vary widely from store to store. A universal standard amongst stores for organising classical music would be ideal. However, this is half the problem; for DSPs to ever display classical metadata correctly, they’ll always be reliant on a supply of consistently good metadata.

One solution is to supply classical content in a way that’s homogenous with the way the same content is managed by the digital services that invest the most in it. iTunes, in particular, has an established methodology for classical metadata, which encompasses many millions of albums and tracks. Their conventions therefore heavily influence how we should supply our metadata. Or to put it another way, do as the store demands consistently, or don’t see it on store.

Source: A Surprisingly Interesting Dive Into Classical Music Metadata – hypebot

What a Blockchain for Music Really Means

music_splitsBlockchain technology is what enables Bitcoin to allow financial exchange without a middleman. It is effectively a decentralized database where participants follow a protocol to record the ownership of tokens of value and their exchange, without the need for a central entity like a bank to provide trust.

An imaginative person will jump to extend the metaphors of such a system to other domains, and of course to the music industry. A music blockchain would be a single place to publish all information about who made what song, without having to trust a third-party organization.

However, before contemplating such a solution, it is important to distinguish between two distinct but often conflated problems in the music industry—because one must be solved before the other.

Source: Mine Labs

Bad Data Is The Worm In The Apple For Streaming Music

2016 is proving to be tricky year for streaming rights. No sooner did it start to look like artists and labels were beginning to feel comfortable with streaming then along come a veritable flood of songwriter class action suits in the US, against TIDAL, Rhapsody and Spotify, twice.

At the heart of the legal action is the issue of streaming services not paying mechanical rights to songwriters because they have not identified and / or not been able to identify, all of the the songwriters.

The streaming services counter that they a) have been adhering to the rules as they stand and b) that it is difficult / impossible for them to track everything. It is a complex issue that may even have some of its underlying assumptions turned upside down (in favour of streaming services). For a good introduction to the issues see this balanced MusicAlly piece. Whatever the legal intricacies though, there is a crucial underling issue: bad data.

Or, to be more precise, a complete lack of data.

International music licensing is highly complex and anyone who tries to tell you differently is either wrong or lying. That is not to suggest for a moment that music services should somehow not have an obligation to invest time, effort and resource into licensing music, far from it. But it does mean that the current system is not fit for purpose.

Source: MIDiA Research

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

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

Bitcoin and the Future of User Monetizable Data

big_data_analytics_thinkstock_470971869-100439197-primary.idgeWeb searches, page visits, online purchases, tweets, SMS messages, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, GPS coordinates – this is the data that makes up our digital lives.

For the past decade consumers have sacrificed their privacy, building giant banks of data for companies without any upside exposure to the value that they have created. Thanks to the Bitcoin Protocol and the 21 Bitcoin Computer this no longer has to be the case.

Billions of photos are shared every day by hundreds of millions of people using smartphones. Between the rapid development of high quality camera phones and the decreased cost for cloud storage, sharing photos from all around the world has become effectively free.

Building a library of stock photos once required an army of photographers working around the globe; now this naturally occurs over social networks such as Instagram.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

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