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Spotify has announced its acquisition of blockchain technology company Mediachain Labs to help it reward online content owners with royalty payments.
The news, first reported by VentureBeat on Wednesday, was relayed via a Spotify press release which has since been removed from its website, explaining that the purchase of the New York-based startup was aimed at facilitating Spotify's "journey toward a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners".
Mediachain is responsible for the creation of an open source peer-to-peer database and protocol for registering, identifying, and tracking creative works online. The blockchain component aims to help creators and rights holders prove they are the owner of a piece of work and receive due payment.
Spotify has faced legal trouble in the past over its failure to pay artists and publishers, which is said to be down to difficulties it has had in working out who to pay, a problem which relates especially to smaller artists and labels.
Last month, Spotify reached a $30 million settlement with a publishing group over unpaid royalties and agreed to put in place a system that guaranteed a "reasonable effort" would be made to match all music streams with creators and rights owners.
Spotify recently passed 50 million paid subscribers. The Mediachain acquisition deal – the terms of which were not disclosed – appears to be part of the company's plan to gain wider support from the creative community as it gears up to become an initial public offering on the stock market sometime next year.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)Yeah, it doesn't add up, so something is probably missing from the story. Usually these cryptocurrency systems are designed to let many individuals contribute arbitrarily small amounts of money to things easily, securely, for cheap/free, and sometimes anonymously. It's a neat concept that I'd like to see implemented if they can get rid of the anonymity, but I've only ever heard of criminals and ultra-geeks using it, and I don't see why Spotify needs it.
Blockchain is ground breaking technology that forms a distributed ledger, every company will be using some form of it in the future. Read up.I didn't realize that you need special startup technology to figure out who wrote the song your service is streaming. Other streaming services must really be struggling to figure out who wrote what. I just assumed Spotify just wasn't paying fairly. Silly me.
One needs to see the much bigger picture here. Blockchain technology has the potential to cut away big parts of the licensing jobs the labels, distribution companies, royalty collection agencies etc. are doing now and will eventually bring artists a bigger piece of the revenue cake since there will be less other parties involved in between the artists and their audiences.It's a neat concept that I'd like to see implemented if they can get rid of the anonymity, but I've only ever heard of criminals and ultra-geeks using it, and I don't see why Spotify needs it.
You've got it backwards. Blockchain isn't anonymous at all. If you want to do money laundering, you do it with cash or gift cards. Those are completely anonymous and untrackable. Blockchain is easy to track - every unit is clearly labeled with every person who has ever had possession of it.How fair Spotify could pay those content owners? Same level as Apple Music? Or just bare minimum?
Search and you shall find:Personally don't really like Spotify but if it is gone, I will have no free streaming service to use.
"For instance, the latest RIAA report showed ('https://9to5mac.com/2017/03/30/music-streaming-artist-payout-rates/') that while Apple pays between $12 and $15 per 1,000 streams, Spotify pays around $7. YouTube, however, remains the worst at around $1 per 1,000 streams."
Spotify aiming to solve its unpaid royalties problem with acquisition of Mediachain startup (https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/26/spotify-database-rights-holders-acquisition/)