dotBlockchain Music Project Announces First Industry Partners

NEW YORK, Feb. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- The dotBlockchain Music Project (dotBC), whose aim is to solve the complex data, rights, ownership and payment issues that currently plague the music industry, announced today its first four industry partners: Canadian Music rights organization SOCAN, its wholly owned subsidiary MediaNet, Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA. The partners announced today will contribute vital technical and financial resources to the project, which will allow dotBC to accelerate its product development efforts.

The combined companies have the potential to bring a catalog of more than 65 million sound recordings from independent and major labels linked to the world's repertoire of musical works into the ecosystem globally. 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.

Other key players in the space, including key digital service providers and rights holders have also committed to sponsor the development of dotBC, but have chosen to remain behind the scenes for now. 

Following the release of phase one of the open source code into GitHub earlier in the year, the dotBC team began collaborating with these industry partners representing key components of the music business ecosystem.

"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."

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

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."

Tracy Maddux, CEO of CD Baby commented: "CD Baby is excited to work with dotBlockchain to assist our independent artists and songwriters in managing their music rights and assuring payment. This approach to Blockchain technology could change everything for DIY musicians."

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: http://queue.dotblockchainmusic.com. For more information, signup through the company's website www.dotblockchainmusic.com, email list and public Slack channel.

About Dot Blockchain Music, Inc
DotBC is a Delaware public benefit corporation which seeks to revolutionize the music rights clearance process by creating an open system with blockchain technology and a file container to "wrap" rights information that links to a decentralized database. Co-founded by industry veterans Benji Rogers, Ken Umezaki, Bill Wilson, Allen Bargfrede, and Chris Tse with offices in New York and Paris, the company's focus is on building a backend ecosystem which can provide better information about rights ownership, faster payments, and greater transparency.

About SOCAN
SOCAN connects more than four-million music creators worldwide and more than a quarter-million businesses and individuals in Canada. Nearly 150,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers are its direct members, and more than 130,000 organizations are Licensed To Play music across Canada. With a concerted use of progressive technology and a commitment to lead the global transformation of music rights, with wholly-owned companies Audiam and MediaNet, SOCAN is dedicated to upholding the fundamental truths that music has value and music creators and publishers deserve fair compensation for their work. For more information: www.socan.ca

About MediaNet
MediaNet maintains one of the largest B2B rights-managed, global music catalogs of more than 57 million tracks and a database of over 4.1 million rights holders and their respective works. MediaNet's database of rights holders encompasses composers, publishers, administrators, PROs, collection societies, performers, labels, and distributors. MediaNet leads the music industry by hosting the only commercially available catalog of sound recordings connected directly to a comprehensive database of rights, ownership, and songwriting splits. MediaNet enables accurate royalty administration for streaming music apps, subscription services, and download stores. MediaNet has powered many popular digital music services worldwide including Beats Music, Pulselocker, Songza, Target, and Univision.
www.mndigital.com

About Songtrust
Songtrust, a division of Downtown Music Publishing, was established in 2011 to democratize global royalty collection. Songtrust provides a technology platform that enables independent songwriters, artists, publishers, distributors, managers, and other music industry professionals to collect publishing royalties worldwide while retaining 100% ownership. Named a Billboard Top 10 Music Startup, the Songtrust platform now enables over 100,000 creators and 13,000 businesses at all levels to collect royalties directly from 100+ countries, covering 20,000+ income sources.

About CD Baby
CD Baby is one of the largest distributors of independent music on the planet, home to more than 400,000 artists. The CD Baby catalog makes up an estimated 17 per cent of iTunes track offerings. With a one-stop professional dashboard allowing indie musicians to manage their royalties and licensing, CD Baby has become the go-to partner for many icons in the new music industry. Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and Macklemore had their start on CD Baby, while others like Ingrid Michaelson and Gregory Alan Isakov have maintained independent and highly successful careers. Greg Brown, Willis Earl Beale, and Grant Lee Phillips are among musicians who've dropped the old label system and turned to CD Baby to strike out on their own.

About FUGA
FUGA is the high-end technology partner for content owners and distributors.

Offering a broad array of services, providing end-to-end integration, FUGA is the number one choice for some of the largest labels, management companies and distributors worldwide. These include Tommy Boy Entertainment, Ultra Records, Curb Records, Epitaph Records, Domino, Ministry of Sound, Red Essential, Spinnin' Records, Armin van Buuren's Armada Music, Afrojack's Wall Recordings and Ninja Tune.

At the heart of FUGA's platform is its adaptable and flexible technology that has been built in conjunction with leading music partners, to meet rapidly evolving industry requirements. This ensures its clients are continually able to execute their content management, distribution, aggregation, analytics and royalty accounting in the most efficient way as the business evolves.

Connected to over 260 digital service providers worldwide, over 2 million tracks are currently managed from within the FUGA system, with up to 2.5 million deliveries being performed every month.

Established in 2006, FUGA is an independent company headquartered in Amsterdam with an international footprint.  www.fuga.com

SOURCE dotBlockchain Music Project