Music Rights Database, Essay Example

It is widely acknowledged that data and information related to music works and rights often tend to be challenging to obtain, a phenomenon that the Global Repertoire Database tried to address before its downfall in 2014. In the era of advanced systems and the Internet, it remains challenging to access information regarding the control and ownership of music works and rights. This often makes the licensing process time-consuming and costly. Therefore, it is assumable that the accessibility and availability of multinational music works and rights may significantly reduce such transactional costs besides generating more business within the industry. Given these changes, databases may prove to be efficient in streamlining the control and ownership of music works and rights to make the payment of artists within the music industry easy.

Several techniques have emerged for creating efficient database systems. However, the interoperability of such measures is often met with hiccups.  Before starting MediaChain Labs, Solange Knowles co-founded Cool Managers—an artist management entity that represented musicians. Through this management system, an array of challenges related to music data ensued. The problem revolved around the lack of a central database that kept track of data and information about the specifics of music (About MediaChain, n.d.). Two major types of data and information regarding a piece of music are considered fundamental: 1) who produced the music and 2) who owns rights to the content. Currently, such information seems fiendish to trace and track down, a factor that works to the detriment of the music content creators or artists. Blockchain is currently evolving in addressing some of the plaguing problems that are negatively impacting the music industry. Through blockchain technologies, musicians are currently in a position to receive their equitable royalty payments. For instance, MediaChain, as established by Bonde (2010), is a peer-to-peer blockchain database widely used in the sharing of information across varied networks, organizations, and applications. Besides the organization of open-source information through the issuance of unique identifiers and systems for information and data, MediaChain equally works with the artists in ensuring that they are fairly paid their royalties.   The organization primarily issues smart contracts for the musicians by directly stating their royalty stipulations as provided without confusing contingencies and third parties (Bonde, 2010). An example of organizations that rely on the use of MediaChain includes the music giant Spotify believed to have acquired the database in 2017 for the sole objective of solving the issue of royalty payments to the rights holders within the industry.  On the other hand, recording companies can trace music streams and pay all their artists to contribute to their songs or albums. MediaChain remains one of the leading music rights databases.

The MediaChain is a newly launched type of metadata system and protocol that functions as a decentralized data network that provides an apolitical avenue for internet scape platforms, media organizations, innovative developers, and creators to innovate, collaborate, and establish a new and unique generation of media systems and applications widely known to play on fair terms. The database provides an array of benefits to its users as it allows the digital creators to attach information and data to their creative works efficiently. MediaChain equally depends on machine learning processes that allow the users to attach and identify their information through a reverse query approach in searching for their information and data. Before the launch of MediaChain, Kant (2015) establishes that interests had ensued regarding the need to protect the platform’s legitimacy and that of its users from different actors that may claim ownership to their works. Denis Nazarov—the co-founder of the company, stated that:

“Imagine being able to connect with the artist of a viral GIF you see in your feed, learn the history or origin of any image, or automatically reward a musician whenever you press play. Developers can build this and much more given the tools to discover and reuse information about our universal culture” (Sheieber,2016).

Therefore, the MediaChain repository provides close to 2 million images used as identifiers or meta records within its content library from different organizations that include the Digital Public Library of America, Getty Images, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Efforts that may be used in making this database functional revolves around feeding the system with the required data. Information that includes the owners of a piece of music ‘s content and the producers serve as unique identifiers in this decentralized system. The input of these identifiers in the database makes it easier to access and disburse royalties to the right artists (Kant, 2015). MediaChain Labs first found root in a file-sharing free-for-all epoch that saw BitTorrent, Napster, Tumblr, and Megaupload’s affect the industry for decades. However, the new music community developed massive systems and corpuses of art that are widely reproduced through different online platforms such as Instagram. Another approach to maintaining this platform lies in its integration with specific social media platforms such as Instagram. This may play a fundamental role in enabling the users to easily search images the include those that have been altered for several reasons. The social media platforms may therefore improve the systems of monetization through the use of effective web analytics.

Data in the MediaChain platform is signed, and content addressed. This means that every single object in this system tracks information about self-certification and location independence. The data tracked within the system may be replicated and served by several untrusted entities while remaining trustworthy and tamper-proof, given that data integrity on the system is cryptographically verifiable. On the other hand, content addressing remains another phenomenon on the system that enables and enhances the immutability of the data collected within the system (Darnell, 2018). Since statements are signed, the established contributors’ independence may be verified to maintain a trial of provenance when data and information are reused. One of the world’s popular streaming music networks and services is alleged to have faced significant challenges over the past regarding the need to ensure that legitimate and the right creators are primarily compensated and paid for their streams for several reasons. Currently, billions of songs and tracks are primarily played on Spotify on a daily basis; however, several of these contents lack proper metadata that ensures that the right content or rather songwriters and rights holders to the content are tagged, a factor that mans that their royalties are prone to go missing due to the lack of registration (Darnell, 2018). Rich relations between the objects expressed as established on this platform are typically expressed within the platform through the DAGs (IPLD) on the object content. This factor allows and provides for the application to layer the user’s needs.

References

Bonde, L. O. (2010). Guided Imagery and Music Bibliography and GIM/Related Literature RefWorks Database. Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, 10(3). https://doi.org/10.15845/voices.v10i3.561

Darnell, H. (2018). Music Rights Unveiled: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Music Rights and Licensing. Music Reference Services Quarterly, 21(4), 234–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/10588167.2018.1522893

Jonathan, Sheieber (2016) “Mediachain Enivisions a Blockchain-Based Tool for Identifying Artists’ Work across the Internet.” TechCrunch, techcrunch.com/2016/06/01/mediachain-enivisions-a-blockchain-based-tool-for-identifying-artists-work-across-the-internet/. Accessed 29 June 2021.

Kant, T. (2015). FCJ-180 “Spotify Has Added an Event to Your Past”: (Re)writing the Self through Facebook’s Autoposting Apps. The Fibreculture Journal, 25, 30–62. https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.25.180.2015

Mediachain : About Mediachain. (n.d.). Docs.mediachain.io. Retrieved June 28, 2021, from http://docs.mediachain.io/about/about