How Does Blockchain Challenge Metadata and the Sustainability of Music Streaming?
For this episode, Digital Dissect brings you into a complex, and often misunderstood conversation. It will require a little of your patience to understand the motivations and technicalities behind new start-ups in the technology sector, that aim to better the music industry by providing value around intellectual property. However, it aims to inspire you to think about how innovation is breaking open an astonishing opportunity for change. I have spent the last four years exploring how blockchain technology, has been creating a new digital ecosystem, whereby musicians can get paid what they should, when they should. In this episode, we specifically explore issues surrounding metadata and how solutions could better the music streaming and royalty ecosystem.
Blockchain is a distributed software network that functions both as a mechanism enabling the secure transfer of assets without an intermediary. We are hopeful that by removing intermediaries, parties on either side of a distribution deal can receive 100% of a payment whilst retaining ownership of their data through smart contracts - these transparent exchanges cleaning up information tracking and allowing more honest relationships to form between labels, artists and fans. This is critical to the reputation of industries reliant on digital technology specifically for marketing purposes, with the rise of bad press around platform capitalism, data manipulation and information asymmetry.
To break down how blockchain can solve issues surrounding metadata, that consequently affect how artists get paid, Marketing Associate Emsy Petersen, explains how Blokur use machine learning to better represent rights data. Having recently partnered with Universal Music Group and The Mechanical Licensing Network, as well as Massive Attack having tracked rights attribution through the platform for remixes of their #1 album Mezzanine, there is no better representative to address these complex issues that come with a contemporary digital economy.
Matthew Lovett joins us from an academic perspective, having published several research papers and remained active in the new tech community as it’s developed in it’s demand. He gives us an insight into alternative streaming platforms like Rocki, who use cryptocurrency to reward artists, fuelling a discussion around micro-transactions for live-streaming, music-streaming and social media exchanges. View Matthew’s latest paper where he discusses Rocki, ‘Directions In Music: Stakeholder Perspectives on Blockchain Innovations in Music Streaming’, here and more about Blokur’s collaborations here.
With a lot of valuable concepts to teach us surrounding this topic as the technology keeps reigning prosperous, particularly in a time of economic turmoil, listen now on the platform of your choice to understand how it lends itself to a variety of solutions that can break through both economic and political barriers in the music industry.