Musicians like this drummer can focus on their music with fewer worries about being paid on time when they use Blockchain applications like those being developed by dotBC. Image credit DrumsOnTheWeb

The dotBlockchain Music Project (dotBC) recently announced its first partners, Canadian Music rights organization SOCAN, its wholly owned subsidiary MediaNet, Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA. These partners will contribute technical and financial resources that dotBC needs to meet its goals of resolving data, rights, ownership and payment issues that have plagued both musicians and major labels by developing custom Blockchain apps specifically for the music industry.

The combined companies make it possible for major and minor labels from around the world to make their music available globally and could add more than 65 million sound recordings to dotBC’s Blockchain-based 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.

The dotBC team has already released phase one of the open-source code to GitHub and began collaborating with these industry partners representing key components of the music business ecosystem. Some of these partners are major digital service providers and rights holders who have committed to sponsor the development of dotBC, but have chosen to remain anonymous for now.

Who Can Use It?

Blockchain-based applications like the one dotBC is developing could be used by both minor and major labels, as well as independent artists who want to sell their music on an equal footing with the major names in the music industry. The Blockchain is designed to be both transparent and equitable for all of its users.

“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,” said Benji Rogers, co-founder and project lead. “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.”

Organizations like SOCAN and CD Baby are also enthusiastic about the chance to solve inefficiencies in the movement of payments in the music industry. These inefficiencies often cause or exacerbate delays in both the receipt of payments by music labels and in the distribution of royalties to artists and copyright holders throughout the industry.

“The encouraging work of dotBC has the potential to unlock enormous value for our members in that ever-evolving digital ecosystem,” said SOCAN CEO, Eric Baptiste

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.”

The Blockchain can also be used to manage the music rights of artists and copyright holders throughout the industry. It can be used to track the ownership of music rights, log the legitimate transfer of ownership if and when it occurs, and ensure that owners receive fair and prompt payments for their work.

Pieter van Rijn, CEO of FUGA, the high-end tech partner for content owners and distributors commented: “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.”

DotBC is currently onboarding more partners in a similar fashion as well as artists, songwriters and service providers of all shapes and sizes through its queueing site. Anyone interested can also sign up for dotBC’s email list and can email team members to request access to the public Slack chat room.

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