Taology: How the Blockchain Works for Creators in the Music Industry
Two years ago I began a journey to help an industry abused by technology and in dire need of reforms. What started with a few drinks and conversations has now evolved into a dozen projects, all with the goal of restoring value to the creative process by leveraging the power of blockchain technology. It is with distinct pleasure that I have the opportunity now to not simply explain, but to demonstrate in great detail exactly how blockchain technology will resolve decades of conflict within the music industry. From these humble first steps will come the means and methods for major labels and independents to enjoy the most transparent, functional, practical, and portable rights management ever conceived.
In this article it shall be my pleasure to describe for you the operation of an open source platform that leverages 3 different industry accepted technologies with the power of a blockchain for the declaration of provenance, identification, and preservation of musical works. This method is completely compatible with existing US copyright legislation and regulations. It is not a new file format, nor is it a new DRM. It is a means of storing and accessing data in a decentralized manner and without trusting intermediary third parties.
At the risk of being existential, who you are as an individual is what determines your rights to your creative works. The ability to prove you are you is vital to the functioning of our society. Beginning with this philosophy, before we launched our blockchain we turned our sights towards how to establish legal identity within cryptographic systems. With the help of some partners in the fintech world, we have gamified AML/KYC verification procedures in combination with social media and advanced cryptography and integrated it into the process of establishing creative content. When these identity verification processes are then paired with cryptographically unique key pairs, what is created is a legally defendable, cryptographically provable (and private!) “greatest claim” to original creative works.
As these platforms can be really complex, I’m just going to stick to the basics of identity and on-boarding content without diving too deeply into the assignment of ISRC numbers, UPC codes, registration with Performing Rights Organizations and the US Copyright Office. From these humble beginnings it is quite easy to see the path along which this technology is headed. Suffice it to say for now that we are registered with the RIAA and GS1 and already have content in distribution on iTunes and Spotify.
While we are still integrating our specific AML/KYC implementation, our demonstration utilizes the power of social media authentication to illustrate the means of establishing identity in the age of blockchains.
A variety of music related social media platforms have been integrated into our system to allow for a range of comparative identities. A “high score” on the social media identity scale is directly a function of the number of social media accounts associated with your cryptographic identity.
To begin, one simply selects any of them to form the foundation of the identity. I’m going to use Facebook.
Each identity has a “shorthand” code which is represented in 6 bytes. For this demonstration, mine is “eff77f5644b5.”
This code is derived from a complex set of cryptographic functions which are known as “deterministic,” meaning if you start from the same place you always get the same results. The core of the identity is represented in three plain English sentences extracted from “A Portrait of The Artist” from Project Gutenberg. For the nerdy, the method of selection is via a Markov chain selection algorithm providing a granular randomness to each word, but still forming human-readable text. It requires a huge volume of words to operate properly and still generate sufficient randomness, which is why wordy classics are recommended.
My identity phrase in this demo is “The red rose wins.
