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Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ is both a chart-topping phenomenon and a turning point for the music business. The 20-year-old rapper was a virtually unknown Tweetdecker when “Old Town Road” was embraced by TikTok influencers as the background music to something called the “Yeehaw challenge,” where users transformed into cowboys at the drop of a beat. In the three months since, their collaboration shot to the top of the Billboard Hot 100, where it has spent 12 weeks.

Source: Memes Are the New Pop Stars: How TikTok Became the Future of the Music Industry

In the new report, Music Canada — which represents the major record companies in Canada and works to support and develop the music sector — is calling for the Canadian government to “rebalance the music marketplace and restore fairness to the creators of music,” it states in the press release that came out after the event.

Source: ‘The Creative Middle Class Is Being Annihilated’: Music Canada’s New Report Calls for Closing the Value Gap

As technology develops to the point where AI is capable of creating original music, questions are being raised as to whether this computer generated music, and the people behind the code that make it possible, should be granted the same legal protections as more traditionally created music.

Source: Should Copyright Protect Music Created By Artificial Intelligence?

Entering the correct information about a song sounds like it should be easy enough, but metadata problems have plagued the music industry for decades. Not only are there no standards for how music metadata is collected or displayed, there’s no need to verify the accuracy of a song’s metadata before it gets released, and there’s no one place where music metadata is stored.

Source: Metadata is the biggest little problem plaguing the music industry

IP assets are digital-first products. Weightless, easy-to-copy files are quite ideal to store and distribute over a network, if file size and bandwidth permits. That ‘easy to copy and distribute’ part of IP is what makes blockchain such an effective companion on the commercial journey.

Source: Intellectual property assets: Breaking the ice for blockchain-based economic networks

As the U.S. Copyright Office nears a decision on which nonprofit group will operate the newly created digital licensing organization, the bid widely believed to be the favorite for the work is pushing back against criticism that its application is rife with conflicts of interest.

Source: Battle for music licensing oversight centers on unclaimed royalties

Companies like Forte and Animoca want to use blockchain technology to allow players to trade skins and other in-app purchases. The question is whether the traditional gaming industry will embrace a business model that lets gamers trade—and the nascent tech behind it.

Source: New to Blockchain: Turning In-Game Virtual Goods into Assets

UK songwriters and composers could be losing out on millions in streaming royalties due to the way in which songwriters’ repertoire is licensed to digital music services. That’s according to a new report from the MMF, produced by CMU Insights.

Source: UK songwriters could be losing out on millions in streaming royalties each year, says new MMF report

DDEX, a metadata standards-setting consortium for the music industry,  announced in Nashville this week that it is joining forces with the Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR), a similar consortium that focuses on establishing uniform, unique universal identifiers for film and TV assets, in an alliance that could loosen millions in unmatched royalties from films and TV series.

Source: Groundbreaking Metadata Alliance Announced Between Music, Film, TV Industries

Universal Music Group has a ticking time bomb on its hands. The Copyright Act gives authors the ability to terminate a grant after a 35-year wait, and now there are hundreds of recording artists from the early 1980s who are looking to take advantage of this statutory provision to reclaim ownership rights.

Source: UMG Fights Musicians Who Wish to Terminate Copyright Grants