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Blockchain in the Music Industry

also involves working with the artists by helping them to get their fair pay, as they

are the source of the music or song that is downloaded or streamed. The concept of

smart contracts is used to ensure this fair payment method. There will be no third

party or contingencies involved in the payment process. The smart contract will bind

the musicians with only those who are directly involved in the value chain. In 2017,

Spotify acquired Mediachain to help resolve the royalty payments and rights issues

within the music industry.

Smart contracts can be described as computer programs that run in the block­

chain network (Wang et al., 2019). The task of these programs is to trigger or apply

constraints or business logic to ensure the smooth functioning of the overall task.

In this case, the overall task is the process of royalty payments. The working of this

platform is shown in Figure 9.7 (Mediachain, 2020).

The data from publisher to subscriber follows the procedure described in the next

paragraph. The publisher will have his or her data in their system, and metadata of

that data, along with a statement envelope, is the information that is passed on to

the next stage. The statement envelope consists of a “To” address. It comprises two

parts: The namespace and the metadata fingerprint. The namespace can be defined

as the topic whose related information can be looked up from the directory. Every

unit of the user-generated metadata is associated with a unique identification value

(fingerprint). This unique fingerprint is doubled, making the data more secure in the

process of finding or retrieving it from the database. The “From” part of the meta­

data consists of a signature part. Mediachain’s task is to integrate identity services

like Blockstack or Keybase to link the cryptographic signatures with familiar names.

9.14.2  UJO

This company, located in New York, provides a decentralized database that stores

the ownership rights of music and is also involved in automating the royalty pay­

ments. Artists of the original creations, such as songs or albums, can upload these

works, publish their work or control the options related to licensing and also can

manage the distribution of their work through the platform based on blockchain

FIGURE 9.7  Mediachain workflow.