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DotBlockChain Music Project Announces First Industry Partners
February 1, 2017 at 12:32 PM (PT)
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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 its first four industry partners: CANADIAN music rights organization SOCAN, its wholly owned subsidiary MEDIANET, SONGTRUST, CD BABY and FUGA. The partners will contribute 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 global ecosystem. 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 unannounced 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.
DOTBC Co-Founder and Project Lead BENJI ROGERS commented: "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. 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 CEO ERIC BAPTISTE added: "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. The encouraging work of dotBC has the potential to unlock enormous value for our members in that ever-evolving digital ecosystem."
DOWNTOWN MUSIC PUBLISHING VP Technology and SONGTRUST GM said: "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."
CD BABY CEO TRACY MADDUX stated: "CD BABY is excited to work with dotBC 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."
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 queuing site. For more information, signup through the company's website, email list and public SLACK channel.

