The dotBlockchain Music Project – dotBC, which aims is to solve the complex data, rights, ownership and payment issues experienced in the music industry, has announced its first four industry partners: Canadian Music rights organization SOCAN, its wholly owned subsidiary MediaNet, Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA. The partners will contribute vital technical and financial resources to the project, which will allow dotBC to accelerate its product development efforts.
The combined companies bring a catalog of more than 65 million sound recordings from independent and major labels linked to the world’s repertoire of musical works into the global ecosystem. With more than 500,000 new recordings added each month, dotBC will be working with the vast majority of the modern music library, ensuring comprehensive coverage of recorded works for the project.
Other key players in the space, including digital service providers and rights holders have also committed to sponsor the development of dotBC, but have not been revealed yet. Following the release of phase one of the open source code into GitHub earlier in the year, the dotBC team began collaborating with these industry partners representing important components of the music business ecosystem. DotBC is currently on-boarding more partners in a similar fashion as well as artists, songwriters and service providers of all varieties.
Benji Rogers, co-founder and project lead, explained: “In putting that first foot down, these pioneering companies are helping us to build and deploy the real-world architecture needed to create a fair, equitable and efficient way for the music industry to work together in the digital rights world. We could not be more excited to have the teams from these amazing companies involved. Industry-wide adoption of the dotBC format is our goal and this feels like a very promising first step.”
SOCAN CEO, Eric Baptiste said: “SOCAN has always been at the forefront of transparency and accountability with innovations like ‘drill-down’ online royalty statements and calculators that have been available to our members for close to a decade now. We are convinced that it is possible to address payment and rights inefficiencies in the digital music world that have been a drag on the entire ecosystem for far too long. The encouraging work of dotBC has the potential to unlock enormous value for our members in that ever-evolving digital ecosystem.”
Joe Conyers, GM of Songtrust and VP Technology of Downtown Music Publishing added: “The dotBC team’s composition first approach represents a refreshing change to previous approaches to this data challenge and as such were excited to advance work toward distributed systems to help our songwriters and publishing partners.”
Tracy Maddux, CEO of CD Baby, commented: “CD Baby is excited to work with dotBlockchain to assist our independent artists and songwriters in managing their music rights and assuring payment. This approach to Blockchain technology could change everything for DIY musicians.”
CEO of FUGA - the high-end tech partner for content owners and distributors, Pieter van Rijn noted: “The potential of blockchain technologies to revolutionize rights and royalties is well documented. At FUGA we strive to remain at the frontier of such innovations, so we’re delighted to be rolling up our sleeves for this project in cooperation with some of our clients.”
