Open Music Initiative will change the way royalties work
Thanks to the Open Music Initiative the way that royalties in the music business works, could completely change.
Berklee College of Music
It is an open source platform that will help rights holders track royalties more easily. Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, SoundCloud, Netflix and SiriusXM have all gotten together with Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music in an attempt to transform how digital royalties are paid.
The Open Music Initiative is being run by the Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE) in cooperation with the MIT Media Lab.
They are creating an open source platform to track music creators and rights owners to improve how they’re identified and compensated for digital music.
According to the Open Music Initiative co-founder, major record labels and streaming services make up the fifty plus media companies who have united forces in an initiative that has been “created a shared digital architecture for the modern music business. We believe an open sourced platform around creative rights can yield an innovation dividend for creators and rights holders alike.”
It would seem that an open music initiative that is being backed by such an impressive list of powerful and successful companies makes it a formidable force. Streaming is the inevitable future for the consumption of music and film so it is little surprise that companies like Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Netflix are involved. This could potentially be really good news for musicians and film makers by helping them receive due payment for the use and enjoyment of their work online.
Ensuring that creators receive their digital royalties will help bolster the continuity and growth of the global music business.
Last year in June, Daniel Ek the CEO at Spotify announced that the company had paid out over $3 billion in royalties. While $300 million of that money came through in the first three months of during 2015.
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