The Music industry and Blockchains (Part 1: DotBlockchain Media)

I have been closely following most of the different use cases applying Blockchain technology with music in the last 2 years.

I decided to write short presentations for each of these projects, explaining what these different projects are about, their Pros and Cons etc...

PART 1: DotBlockchain Media, founded by Benji Rogers : 

Early February 2017, I was pleased to read a major announcement: 

SOCAN (the major Canadian PRO), Cd Baby, Song Trust, Fuga and medianet officially partnered to help develop this project. 

The idea of DotBlockchainMedia in a nutshell: create a new file format for music, including ownership information in the song itself. 

Instead of being a .wav or a .mp3, a music file would now be a .bc, and would contain all of the song's information (as soon as the song is exported from any DAW), written in a blockchain. It would need to include at least one writer and one publisher of the song(=minimum viable data). 

This .bc file would be at the center of what they call a "Concentric ring architecture". 

Their goal is to finally bring interoperability in the music ecosystem. They want this project to be "the rails" underlying a modern, smartest music ecosystem.   

 The song file being in the center of this "Concentric ring" means that everyone ( artists, labels, PRO, publishers, DSP, performers, fans) can see the same data and interact with the songs (licensing, streaming, asking permission for remixes...), bringing interoperability and more fluidity between every actor of the industry.

Pros:

• Fixing the industry from the ground-up
• Blockchain "agnostic" 
• Successfull Team (For exemple, the CEO Benji Rogers also co-founded "Pledge Music")
• Major partnerships (SOCAN, Cd Baby, Fuga, Songtrust, Unison...)
•  Non-Profit

          

Cons:

• As of now there is no established payment system (from what I read last month on their slack channel), only ownership information and conditions embedded in files.
• Uses a private blockchain (Hyperledger) 

For more info: http://dotblockchainmusic.com/

Sources: http://dotblockchainmusic.com/