This coming week (March 21-22) the University of Applied Sciences Salzburg will host a Blockchain & Music Hackathon. During this two day event registered participants will be taking part in a "Music Portfolio Challenge" to build a blockchain-based music platform. According to the website this will be the task at hand:
Create a decentralized platform for the registration and distribution of content (in our case: music) that certifies the authorship and license of any digital creation. The platform should be able to create unique signatures for every piece of content and verify rights and transactions with three basic functions: 1. Register content metadata 2. Issue smart contracts 3. Use of a cryptocurrency.
The above sounds very much like what we currently have in MUSE. Ok, lets take what they are trying to do at this hackathon and compare it to MUSE. The first goal of task one is to enable easy access and distribution of music. If we go to the MUSE website https://museblockchain.com we can find that it states that:
“A song’s information needs only be entered on MUSE once and all future updates can be done on the Blockchain directly. Once on MUSE, the information, which is updated in real time, is viewable by everyone. All music services can ensure their data is always up to date by using MUSE. These services can also use MUSE as the means of paying the correct rights holders –instantly paid-out royalties .”
I would have to say that the goal of task one has been quite nicely met by MUSE. OK, lets move on to task two and the goal of this task is to; verify rights and uniqueness for every piece of music, verify transactions for every piece of music, and create unique signatures for involved entities. This task is easily accomplished by the MUSE blockchain. All information can be verified on the blockchain. The MUSE website states:
“The MUSE database is open, transparent and constantly in-sync. There are no gatekeepers. MUSE is not proprietary. It is an ownerless, automated, globally distributed, Peer-to-Peer network. You are not giving up your information to a specific company, you are putting it up on a public ledger to ensure everyone has the data required to pay musicians accurately and effectively”
Now lets look at task three’s goal of verifying and linking metadata to music, verifying transactions with regards to ownership and developing a payment system. This is where MUSE shines. On MUSE you can put metadata on the Muse blockchain and therefore it can be verified.
“Whether you are a publisher, a composer, a performer, a lyricist, a label, you now have one central place to input all your music related data. It is yours and only you control your section of it. It is a way for every participant in a song/album to coordinate openly and deal amongst themselves when it comes to copyright, licensing and royalty management data.”
“Licensing on MUSE makes it much easier for people to become licensees, letting you earn more income than the present complex system currently permits. You can upload and update your data in real time, manage licensing conditions, receive payments directly and instantly while getting valuable data on spins and sales.”
“MUSE has a daily budget for royalties, which it divides equally by the number of daily active listeners. MUSE sends royalties to the songs (the recipients indicated within the smart contract of each song) each user listened to during the last 24 hours. MUSE calculates user attention per second. For example: If user Bob spent 200 seconds listening to Song X out of Bob’s 1000 seconds of total listening time today, then 1/5 of Bob’s “assigned” royalties will be paid out to the recipients contained in the Song X smart contract. In other words, Song X captured 1/5 of Bob’s attention today, hence Song X’s copyright holders will receive 1/5 of the royalties MUSE distributes. Had Bob spent 100% of his time listening to Song X, then 100% of Bob’s “assigned” value would have been paid out to Song X’s recipients.”
Under MUSE, “A user can create a smart contract that contains instructions on how any funds sent to the contract should be distributed.”
It definitely looks like MUSE does everything this Music Portfolio Challenge is trying to accomplish, nonetheless it will be very interesting to see what comes out of this hackathon. Quite possibly one of these hackers would be make a good addition to the current MUSE team. Comments are welcome and upvotes are much appreciated :)