When you upload a song to digital platforms (ex: Spotify, Apple Music and more) through any aggregator (ex: Tunecore), your song is marked with metadata. This is necessary in order to be able to track the phono image of your song each time it is played. It sounds easy, but it actually gets very complicated when each platform has its own system of metadata and identifiers. Taking into account that there are currently hundreds of platforms, and that song rights can be licensed, make new recordings of the same song and many other possibilities, the disorder can grow so much that an agreement of: who should be paid is not possible how many.
Episode # 8
There is a system that manages to solve all these problems. It is a technology that has been revolutionizing many fronts in the world. From challenging the currency system in its Bitcoin version to causing the birth of smart contracts that omit the need for intermediary institutions for contracts from the simplest and most common civil to large-scale corporate.
This technology is called Blockchain and the company Unison Rights has already presented its new copyright management model for the music industry where it uses blockchain technology. This technology, as its name indicates, are blocks with information that when registering are chained and it is not possible to remove, amend or add links because they are registered in thousands of computers in the world at the same time and to alter it it would be necessary to delete the block in all the computers in the world where it has been registered.
This would give an absolute solution to the 3 current problems, Order, Transparency and Legitimacy to the data to be able to distribute them. As I always say: "The solution of a problem always brings new problems", so we will review the detail of this path to travel and in the next episode I will show you how this technology applied to the world of copyright in music works. and the ghost he faces.