Funds focused on music royalties are gaining traction as investors stray from the beaten path in a hunt for yield. Such funds buy the rights to music catalogs and generate royalty payments for investors when songs are bought, streamed or performed. The firms behind the funds say they actively manage these assets, seeking licensing deals that allow songs to generate greater income.
Source: Investors in Search of Yield Turn to Music-Royalty Funds
When Microsoft terminated its ebooks store – a service – it did not have to recall the books it had vended; instead, it terminated access to them. In essence, although the books continue to exist as intellectual property, those copies of the books just went away at the sole discretion of the provider, subject only to any contractual obligations (which Microsoft has sought to ameliorate by reimbursing its customers, although to be fair, it is not clear that the company is under any legal obligation to do so).
Source: Microsoft is discontinuing their service of e-books from their online store.
Now that Warner Music Group has mastered streaming, generating $2 billion in revenue from the technology, the music giant behind Cardi B, Ed Sheerhan and Bruno Mars has set its sights on blockchain, joining an $11.2 million investment in Dapper Labs, best known for making the viral blockchain game, CryptoKitties.
Testifying on behalf of Apple on March 8th, 2017, Dale Cendali of legal giant Kirkland & Ellis told the CRB that “the current rate structure is overly complicated and lacks transparency because royalties depend on the amount of revenue a service generates … and because of that, songwriters may receive different compensation even though it is the same song being streamed.”
Source: Apple Wanted to Revolutionize the Way Streaming Pays. Here’s Why It Wasn’t Allowed
The National Music Publishers Association is challenging Spotify and Amazon’s methods of determining mechanical royalties, putting into question whether the services are underpaying publishers. On Tuesday (Aug. 27), the NMPA sent letters to both companies seeking more information on how they are applying various components of the Copyright Royalty Board’s three-tier rate formula.
Source: NMPA Questions Whether Spotify & Amazon Have Miscalculated, Underpaid Publisher Royalties
In a suit filed Wednesday in federal court in Nashville, Eight Mile accuses Spotify of willful copyright infringement by reproducing “Lose Yourself” and about 250 of the rapper’s songs on its service to the tune of potentially billions of dollars in alleged damages. The suit also targets the Music Modernization Act, a federal law enacted last October that was intended to make life easier for tech companies and to get songwriters paid.
Source: Eminem Publisher Sues Spotify Claiming Massive Copyright Breach, “Unconstitutional” Law
While music publishers, songwriters and both ASCAP and BMI are urging the U.S. Department of Justice to reform the consent decrees under which the two performance rights organizations operate, and eventually allow them to expire, music users insist that the consent decrees are vital to the music licensing landscape and without them chaos would reign.
Despite its relative infancy, several foundational solutions and use cases are starting to showcase blockchain’s immediate potential and pique the interest of media organizations. One such example is blockchain’s role in verifying the provenance and pedigree of assets to enable collaboration across the industry.
Source: Blockchain in Media and Entertainment: The Future Calls
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved a second blockchain company’s request to sell its tokens to the public on July 11, a day after breaking ground by greenlighting its first public cryptocurrency sale. The SEC’s approval of live streaming platform YouNow’s Props token offering falls under Reg A+, which allows startups to raise up to $50 million in a public offering with fewer disclosures than a full IPO requires.
YouTube has revamped its manual copyright claim system, which now requires copyright owners to provide time-stamps indicating where their content appears in videos without the proper license. The updates, announced by project manager Julian Bill in a blog post, are intended to ease confusion around the manual claim system and make it easier for creators to remove infringing content associated with claims.