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Can Blockchain Save The Music Industry? (wired.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Wired:
Last fall, a group of music industry heavyweights gathered in New York City to do something they'd mostly failed to do up to that point: work together. Representatives from major labels like Universal, Sony, and Warner sat next to technologists from companies like Spotify, YouTube, and Ideo and discussed the collective issues threatening their industry... The participants of that confab would later form a group called the Open Music Initiative... "Pretty early on it was obvious that there's an information gap in the industry," says Erik Beijnoff, a product developer at Spotify and a member of the OMI.
That "information gap" refers to the data around who helped create a song. Publishers might keep track of who wrote the underlying composition of a song, or the session drummer on a recording, but that information doesn't always show up in a digital file's metadata. This disconnect between the person who composed a song, the person who recorded it, and the subsequent plays, has led to problems like writers and artists not getting paid for their work, and publishers suing streaming companies as they struggle to identify who is owed royalties. "It's a simple question of attribution," says Berklee College of Music's vice president of innovation and strategy, Panos A. Panay. "And payments follow attribution."
Over the last year, members of the OMI -- almost 200 organizations in total -- have worked to develop just that. As a first step, they've created an API that companies can voluntarily build into their systems to help identify key data points like the names of musicians and composers, plus how many times and where tracks are played. This information is then stored on a decentralized database using blockchain technology -- which means no one owns the information, but everyone can access it.
That "information gap" refers to the data around who helped create a song. Publishers might keep track of who wrote the underlying composition of a song, or the session drummer on a recording, but that information doesn't always show up in a digital file's metadata. This disconnect between the person who composed a song, the person who recorded it, and the subsequent plays, has led to problems like writers and artists not getting paid for their work, and publishers suing streaming companies as they struggle to identify who is owed royalties. "It's a simple question of attribution," says Berklee College of Music's vice president of innovation and strategy, Panos A. Panay. "And payments follow attribution."
Over the last year, members of the OMI -- almost 200 organizations in total -- have worked to develop just that. As a first step, they've created an API that companies can voluntarily build into their systems to help identify key data points like the names of musicians and composers, plus how many times and where tracks are played. This information is then stored on a decentralized database using blockchain technology -- which means no one owns the information, but everyone can access it.
Getting rid of record companies could save music though.
Music will always be an entertainment business regardless of blockchain.
Will blockchain save some specific business model? Who cares.
I'm totally sure that's the reason.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This is exactly why Musicoin (MUSIC) was created.
Blockchain technology so far has failed to achieve ... anything. It does sound like everyone just wants to throw it at everything and hope it sticks to something.
Opportunism fucks itself, why should we care? Music will be fine without the "industry" that parasitically feeds off artistry and churns nothing-pop. Fuck the music industry.
Letting it die will be the best thing for music possible.
This is the bunch that wilfully chose to be (and in their own words) "last to market" on "digital".
IOW, they're screaming idiots complaining about their entitlement, not actually in the business of "entertaining" anybody. And it shows, looking at what they put on the market. No amount of anything can save such idiots. Certainly not "blockchain".
There's another reason: "Blockchain" solves a very specific problem at a rather steep cost. I don't see how that would apply to distributing music, really. It's either stupidly expensive or it's just stupid, as in DRM with a bit of faux-decentralized sauce.
Who will save your soul otherwise?
... All problems look like nails.
I git the impression that applying blockchain to attribution databases may be one of these cases.
But I would be pleased to be proven wrong.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The correct question is "should block chain save the music industry?" What the big record companies seem to not have grasp is their tight grip on music is over. Nobody really needs a big ass record company with a huge printing and distribution network to make it.
All they need is a good streaming service and a decent group of followers on social media. it's all coming full circle. The artists can control their own music again.
Big Music (tm) isn't dead yet but the farm is coming out of the house with the shotgun. Time for that trip behind the barn.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
I hate the music industry.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Bitcoins and their ilk are like painfully constructing tulips to sell for a tulip mania.
Not getting paid, er, when and by who? Look, I have a stack of books around here, all of which I bought used. The authors don't get paid - again - when I pick up one from the stack and read it. Why do you people in the music industry think you are so much more special than other artists?
Does keeping attribution information in that level of detail really important? It's not as if the performers actually get paid, unless they reach superstar level.
Copyright should be limited to 14-28 years. That alone would significantly reduce the amount of attribution data to keep track of. Old content should be free. Simple as that.
Nope.
Requiem for the American Dream
They never learn, do they?
You are welcome on my lawn.
...That "information gap" refers to the data around who helped create a song. Publishers might keep track of who wrote the underlying composition of a song, ...
It's been possible to know and track this information for decades. What hasn't been present, and still does not look to be present, is the desire of the music industry executives to share revenues with those who actually create the music. As the old adage goes, ~unless you are a large enough music act that you can dictate the terms of your contract, the record companies will own you and your music.~
.
Anything the record industry does is probably more oriented towards two main goals: (1) extract more money from the consumers of the content, and (2) channel as much of that revenue to the record company executives as possible. Everything else is most likely little more than a smoke screen.
The music industry could easily keep track of all this information.
The simple fact is that they would prefer to rip off artists. Poor information is merely one way to achieve that objective.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Can gaff tape fix something that was born fundamentally broken?
First of all, the music industry is in no need of saving. It never has been, it only grew up with the Internet era, and all the doom and gloom we've been hearing in the past few decades ammounts to a bunch of whinning from people who are still living in the past. It's self evident and you just have to stop a minute to think about it.
Artists and musicians have always taken a minor fraction of all profits the industry makes, and if anything we have far more famous artists these days with far more money than artists had in the past. It's downright ridiculous to think that a industry that generates multiple millionaires a year, all of those who are getting pennies on a dollar for their work, is in any need of "saving".
That's despite piracy worries, despite all the music industry complaints about digital distribution paying little to them, despite the music industry pouring truckloads of money on fruitless stuff like DRM, lawsuits, and a whole bunch of others. I posit the entire industry would be just that much richer these days if they did absolutely nothing about piracy and overall copyright infringements, investing instead on better ways to sell music on the cheap in digital distribution from start.
The fact is that some big labels are getting left behind because they refuse to adapt to new paradigms of music distribution, they get entrenched in old ways, and then another company comes up, seizes the opportunity and sweeps profitability away from them. And then, when they realize that their way isn't working anymore, they start whinning and crying about it saying that the music industry is going away because piracy or something else. It isn't. It's just the cries of old men who did not care about evolving.
Blockchain technology can do little. If it's about securing details of original recordings for those who care about it, sure, why not? But that matters little on the overall scheme of things. As long as you can play a track and capture audio from it, the information will get lost.
And the music industry might be big and powerful, but there's a hard limit to what they can demand from costumers, be if final users or businesses. You just cannot expect everyone to adopt blockchain technology when it's not in anybody's best interest to replace hardware, software, and whatnot just because the industry said so. It's just the same as DRM. Movie and music industry has been trying to force it down people's throat for years now, people have always found a way to strip it right off, bypass or get around it, to keep consuming as they always did.
But this has been clear for a long time now. We've been saying this for long enough to fall on deaf ears. The gaming industry more or less understood this after years and years of wasting money and making costumers furious with anti-piracy crap: Steam did it because it provided a convenient and cheap way of playing games. Platforms like GoG is taking all the old games from an era of aggressive anti-piracy strategies, stripping them all off, and selling those without it. And it works.
But these big labels can keep getting together to divise ways of implementing even more crap to shove down unwilling costumers' throats, as they always did. What will happen next is that companies who knows how to deal with the situation will take over, artists will flock to those platforms as costumers will also do. And then we can all see this dark chapter of corporative greed in music industry and other entertainment related industries come to a close.
and short of UBI or some such it won't be practical for bands to Tour unless somebody fronts the money.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
IMO, blockchain is a solution in search of a problem.
It's like Maslow's hammer:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Is 2017 and with self-producing so cheap and so easy, is incredible to see these behemonths still haven't taken their insanely giant tons of money and done something else. Seriously, their time is in the past and they should do other things, I heard that even Pitbull (the music talker) owns its own school... just like himself.
No, Mildred, blockchains are not a panacea. In fact, this is a typically stupid application of the idea.
Some MBA type, who only thinks he understands blockchains, figured this would be great.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
This seems like a situation where 'blockchain' is both hopelessly outmatched and overkill.
Even the most elegant and fastidious cryptographic verification methods do absolutely nothing to prevent your metadata from being garbage; people can still fail to enter it, enter it inaccurately or dishonestly, enter it correctly for an entity that will be impossible to find two decades from now(or have its own byzantine chain of custody; as in the case of the assets of a dissolved corporation, say); and without people thoroughly, accurately, and honestly filling out a bunch of tedious paperwork, the crypto does little more than help make the garbage look authoritative.
It is certainly true that some metadata schemes are too constrained to track all the information one would like(ID3 tags, say, especially the early versions, are pretty limited); but anyone who thinks that the problem of people not filling out and maintaining basic records is a problem that can be solved by throwing advanced record technology at it should really ponder the shattered dreams of the 'semantic web' for a few minutes.
This idea didn't originate with the record companies, I'm sure. Imogen Heap has been talking about it for quite a while now. At least a couple of years, as far as I can recall.
http://myceliaformusic.org/
Garry Knight
The music industry remains anchored in the 20th century. It should evolve, not be saved.
I remember reading some articles a few years ago talking about "hypertext" *Note that this is NOT HTML. Hypertext was an attempt at creating a universal referencing system that would allow all the information on the internet to be linked and referenced and most critically monetised, no matter what got shifted/changed. Blockchain sort of sounds like something very similar to what was proposed with hypertext. A universal way to track information and ensure payments are made to authors. I know it began of course as a ledger to verify bitcoin payments but it sounds like it might be possible to extend it to a universal payment platform for information/attribution on the internet.
like Uber, Lift and the rest of the "gig" economy pushed by big tech companies, this has gotten swallowed by the race to the bottom. Quartz.com had an article this past week showing that listening is up but revenue is down:
https://qz.com/1071783/apple-m...
revenue is down because people are getting subscriptions for which lawyers and tech companies are taking most of the profit leaving those who actually build, create and do work with crumbs....
lather, rinse, repeat industry to industry....
Losing track of all these creatives/artists/session players is exactly the plan. It always has been.
What they are doing now is trying to figure out how to prove who stole what from the ??AAs. Nothing they want to do will change their greed. The publishers believe they are the reason the music exists, demented but true sadly.
... then "electricity" would have been the proposed solution for whatever problem they had.
Can Blockchain Save The Music Industry?
Their fallback is 2 Chainz.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
It seems blockchain is the solution to all problems these days.
The root cause of this problem appears to be meta data doesn't always exist in the files sent to streaming services. How about trying to fix that problem first?
If they can't get this right, what are the odds they can do it in a distributed ledger?
Now everything must be a block chain. Before that it was IoT. Before that it was all DHT and PEx,
Suddenly the music industry needs saving from a problem that we didn't even know existed.
will the blockchain provide the recording companies more entitlement over the work of the adjacent-but-subservient music industry?
will executives claim the technology performs tasks it does not because a salesman told them it does? Will the become angry with whoever shows them they're wrong?
will this be the last time a whole incumbent, largely exploitative and unnecessary industry eats itself while claiming to be ubiquitous and necessary?
News at 11.
Neither the labels nor the streaming companies have any vested interest in paying their artists. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't want to.
Smart Contracts
Blockchain may not be there solution but is is trying hard to offer solutions. These companies are scared that they're losing all relevance - they are. So they're trying to ride the blockchain silution when actually there are companies offering exciting innovative disruptive solution to this and much more.
There is Opus - a company launching a blockchain version of Soundcloud. They're in beta. This will help artists get discovered and stream their work for a lot cheaper than crapppy Spotify do.
There is Viberate, a company that will use block chain to decentralise event boking and live gigs etc.
There is Aventus - a new blockchain platfrom that aims to solve ticket reselling to vultures by enabling the tracking of any ticket.
These are all innovative products that are decentralised so that cant really be coerced into screwing the little guy like Spotify do with streaming for example. Tbe peiple wull support their own directly, not the big parasitic Asian mega corporations. Resist.
Don't forget the whole other element behind the movies and music in LA.
We (the consumers) pay for these assholes to be able to retain 50 lawyers on average per country for copyright infringement hunts, for the past 15 years or so.
We pay for these idiots at the OMI, money literally thrown out the window, landing in the pockets of people who don't deserve it.
These people should be flogged.
It's so obvious to me that the solution is, and always has been, a public/private keychain, where each "work" (as they like to call it) contains the public key of every participant.
Then, when you die, you can give your private key to your children.
Am I just a complete retard? This seems to fix everything, with technology that has been available forever. What are these asshats seeing that I don't see?
what's a mildred blockchain?
Dear music industry .. go fuck yourselves.
I buy a CD, I rip a CD, what I then do with that music is none of your fucking business. How often I play a song is no longer your concern.
The moment I require constant internet connection to play music so the asshole publishers can keep track of me is the moment I stick with my existing CD collection and never buy any fucking music again.
This is just more overreach by an industry who will eventually try to tell me I'm not allowed to play a song again until I pay them more money.
That is not going to happen. There is no monetizing of my future listening, there is no tracking of my future listening ... because it's none of your fucking concern.
The problem with the music industry is not technology. It's that they don't have a viable business plan. The iTunes store showed the answer they didn't want to hear:
* You can't bundle crap with few diamonds
* You can't change more than the market will bear
* You can't force the market to only buy the genres you think they should buy
None of these things are resolved by technology. They are business 101 fails. These are the result of basic human incompetence.
Any data that reference me in any way including identifying information, location, internet activity, times, etc. etc. is MY intellectual property and is not subject to any of these companies or other entities.
Any claims to the contrary is not with standing. By attempting to track or utilize my data in any way, they are accepting that their actions are military attacks and their networks are subject to the same in kind.
I am part of OMI and it's really wonderful how people are passioned to fix some of the biggest challenges. This can be inefficiencies, lack of speed, missing metadata, interoperability.
Multiple blockchains (private and public) can facilitate decentralized applications / services in the future that bit by bit will contribute to improved models and procedures. Again, it really feels good to be part of this.
Just no
that the "industry" shut down because of infringement?