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.

Comments

Nope

[XSportSeeker]

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.