Yesterday, Canadian firms GuildOne and Beatdapp announced a three-year partnership to manage digital rights for streaming music services using blockchain in India and Japan.
Beatdapp has built a blockchain solution to track music streams in real-time and records the number of times a song was played. It authenticates, verifies, and validates streamed media. It is essentially an audit service for the music industry, to ensure that there are no discrepancies with royalty payments.
Goldman Sachs estimates streaming music royalties will hit $34 billion by 2034. However, Beatdapp found that 15% streaming play count reports are incorrect, which amounts to millions in lost revenue.
GuildOne, which until now has worked with oil and gas majors, will provide its enterprise blockchain expertise to calculate royalties and execute payments. Oil and gas royalties are quite tricky due to numerous stakeholders in the downstream and upstream sectors. In 2018, the company executed its first proof of concept royalty smart contract settlement using blockchain on its Energy Block Exchange (EBX) platform.
Now, the company aims to use this blockchain royalty know-how for payments in the music industry. Beatdapp will create the blockchain transaction log for streaming music, which will be used by GuildOne to calculate royalties due to artists, labels, and producers and execute payments. GuildOne is using its ConTracks solution, a smart contract engine that runs on R3’s enterprise blockchain Corda.
“To partner with a leading expert in the payment space to ensure our verified usage reports yield faster, more accurate payouts to artists and labels is a great outcome for everyone involved. After a year of hard work behind the scenes, we’re delighted that day has come!” said Andrew Batey, Co-CEO of Beatdapp.
“We are particularly looking forward to applying our ConTracks smart contract engine to the burgeoning music royalty market,” said Barry Kreiser, co-founder and CTO of GuildOne.
GuildOne has a substantial presence in the oil and gas sector and assisted the OOC Oil & Gas Blockchain Consortium to trial blockchain-based authorization for expenditure (AFE) balloting.
Meanwhile, last year, South Korea’s CJ Group revealed a digital copyrights system for music.
Algorand is developing a copyright management platform for the Italian Society of Authors and Editors (SIAE). And HTC and Alibaba are invested in Bitmark, a blockchain-based digital property rights firm.
