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A guest blog post from Benji Rogers at dotBlockchain Music

With the dotBlockchain Music project now fully underway and with our first key partners in place, I wanted to share a little about a manager’s role within the system we have built. In dotBlockchain we will be binding the publishing and recording data into the song file itself, creating an unbreakable bond between the artist and writers that you manage and the works that they create. In short, the music file itself is rendered useless if your artist or writer’s ownership information is removed, and once entered it can never be deleted – only amended forward. With this technology in place, ownership will be persistent for the first time in our industry’s history and this data layer will be owned and maintained by all who work with music. This gives you as managers a great deal of power over the works that you represent.

We view the songs and their ownership data as a foundational layer for the music industry. When written into the music industry’s shared ledger or Blockchain, parties such as yourselves and your artists will need a way for you to both verify and identify yourselves to each other and to the system as a whole. The method we have chosen is very similar to the way that Facebook populates your connections and based on a shared trust model that I have outlined in great detail here. We are talking with the MMF about the possibility of them serving as a primary and authoritative verification party to the system. If this were to happen, when you first login or install the application you will be able to identify yourself through them, granting you access to make sure that all of the data on your artists and works are correctly assigned to whom they belong. You will then be able to tag and verify the artists and writers that you represent and they you. Once this initial step is complete you will be able to update any and all of your information from one place and it will be reflected everywhere else. If the publishing changes on one of the songs that one of your artists has written, or if you update a payment bank account or  deal terms change, these amendments will be reflected across to all who use the system including the labels, publishers, PRO’s, and even digital service providers, all from your portal. This would also mean that you could make, track and attend to disputes from a single place as well.

We have just entered the second of three phases of development of the core architecture and look forward to keeping you updated as to our progress on the project. If you’d like to learn more you can join our newsletter, public slack channel or if you’d like to get your hands dirty and participate head here to our queueing site.

A video and basic primer for the project can be found here alongside a more detailed blog here. There’s also a lot more info on our website: http://dotblockchainmusic.com

Thanks