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dotBlockchain announces first music industry partners

By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 2 February 2017

The dotBlockchain Music Project – one of several operations hoping to solve all of the music industry’s data woes with the blockchain – has announced its first four partners. They are SOCAN, Songtrust, CD Baby and FUGA, who will provide technical and financial assistance to the project.

Each partner brings a certain amount of the data that dotBlockchain will require in order to create its vast database of music rights information. In particular Canadian collecting society SOCAN, which is also offering up access to its own super duper database of music rights data, MediaNet, which it acquired last year.

“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”, says dotBlockchain co-founder Benji Rogers.

“We could not be more excited to have the teams from these amazing companies involved”, he added. “Industry-wide adoption of the dotBC format is our goal and this feels like a very promising first step”.

Also talking up the project, 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”.

He went on: “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”.

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