‘A publicly accessible platform on which anyone can make undeletable, tamper-proof assertions about their ownership of or contribution to music sounds like the foundations of anarchy’

The following MBW article/editor comes from Mark Douglas, Chief Information Officer at PPL, the UK music licensing company to more than 130,000 performers and recording rights holders. He argues that, behind the buzz, blockchain is a technology that doesn’t solve, let alone solve, the industry’s main data problem…

As a solution to all the evils in the music industry, blockchain first emerged back in 2016.

Not a week goes by without a conference, blog post or other industry magazine heralding this new transformative technology and how it will reinvent the music ecosystem.

By 2019, this frenzy started to fade and all was quiet for a few years. Many of the startups that will lead this transformation have closed shop and moved on to something new. The rest of us continue with our daily work.

Then, in 2021, NFTs broke into the mainstream and reawakened the blockchain fanbase. The buzz around how blockchains will transform our industry is now rapidly rising to 2017 levels.

Even the Global International Property Organization (WIPO) has joined in, releasing a white paper titled ‘Blockchain Technology and the IP Ecosystem’, which lays out the many and varied ways in which blockchains will address a wide range of issues in the field of Intellectual Property.

Disappointingly, the 189 pages read like an advertisement for blockchains. Perhaps that’s no surprise. WIPO stated in their introduction that the content of the article was created through desk research, a survey of companies playing a role in the blockchain industry, and interviews with ‘relevant’ actors in the IP and blockchain industry.

As with many blockchain commentators, the whole premise of the white paper seems to me back to normal. The questions it seeks to answer are framed as: I have a blockchain, what can I do with it? Hammer and sword nail that hit.

In all my years of designing and delivering technology systems, I’ve found the best approach is to first get to the bottom of what the problem is, then design the solution to best solve it. those problems. Choosing a solution first and then seeing how it can be manipulated to try and solve the problem often leads to failed projects.

That’s when it’s worth understanding the mechanics of a blockchain. By examining how they work, we can better understand the benefits they can deliver and then determine how well they fit into solving the data challenges we face. right in the music industry.

Imagine I want to create a public database of all sound recordings, the original copyright owner of each of those recordings, along with the recording’s release date. Let’s take Welcome to the hell by Black Midi is a recently released example.

The original copyright in that recording is owned by Black Midi and it was released on May 9, 2022. According to database best practices, this data should be represented using appropriate identifier. For sound recordings it would be ISRC (International Standard Recording Code) and for copyright holders use their ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier). For mine Welcome to the hell for example, that gives us ISRC as GBCVZ2200020, ISNI for Black Midi as 0000 0004 7629 4420 and issue date as 09052022.

Now I have data that I want to store on my public database. If I choose to use a blockchain for this, I now have to generate what is called a hash. It’s the hash that makes the data tamper-proof. A hash function is not just a mathematical function that takes any string of characters as input and then generates a fixed length string of characters as output.

Hashing is used in many situations. The last digit of your credit or debit card number is a hash, calculated by putting the first 15 digits through a hash. In many blockchains, the hash used is SHA-256. This function can take any number of characters as input and will always produce a 64 character value as its output.

The combination of the data I’m trying to store, along with this hash, form the ‘block’ bit of a block chain. The hash function is important for blockchains because it makes the content of the data tamper-proof. If you change only one character in the data, a very different hash will be generated.

These ‘blocks’ are then made into ‘chains’ by associating this new block with the previously written block. This is achieved by including the hash from the previous block into the new data being hashed. In this way, any attempt to change the contents of a block or change the sequence of blocks can be detected immediately by recomputing and verifying the hash. This is the bit of encryption of blockchains that makes them tamper-resistant.

“Our problem has never been that there isn’t a tamper-proof place to store that data, that’s one of the data management issues.”

So you might be asking yourself, how does any of these tamper-proof, distributed data storage technologies have the least relevance to solving data challenges in the industry? music industry.

A big part of the answer to this lies in the fact that blockchain is just a specific name for the more general concept of Distributed Ledger Technology. The accountants among you will know that the Ledger is commonly used to record accounting information and includes both debit and credit, two sides of the same coin that all count in the balance sheet. maths.

And indeed, in a business situation you can get both parties to a transaction to agree on its nature and value (borrowers and lenders, payers and bookmakers, buyers and sellers). and merchants), the data they consent to can actually be written to a blockchain, and the tamper-proof nature of this really makes it a reliable record of what happened.

Crucial for many in the blockchain movement, is the removal of the need for a middleman to underpin their passion.

But this key attribute of blockchain does not solve the challenges we face in music data. Our problem is that the necessary data is not collected in the first place. Our problem has never been that there isn’t a tamper-proof place to store that data, that’s one of the data management issues. For several decades, we’ve been able to store data using relatively inexpensive technology that prevents modification with no trace of inspection and that makes it available 24/7, anywhere. In the world.

Some would argue that a publicly open, distributed database is what we need to enable data to be collected at the right time. This is completely missing the point on a few levels. First, it’s a fundamental change in behaviors that we need. We need artists and those around us to understand the importance of data management and then follow good processes to ensure that data is captured and delivered.

“The cryptographic bit of the blockchain doesn’t tell you anything about the authenticity of the data; it just tells you it hasn’t been shuffled since it was added. “

It’s tools like Session, SoundCredit, VEVASound, and Creative Passport that allow this. It is integrated with studio tools that allow this. It is data standards like DDEX RIN that allow this. It’s services like RDx that allow this. Blockchains, at best, are a distraction.

Second, not having a partner to verify the data being added to the blockchain is a problem. So much so that the main strength of a blockchain becomes its giant Achilles heel. You may have noticed that the encryption bit of the blockchain doesn’t tell you anything about the authenticity of the data; it just tells you it hasn’t been shuffled since it was added.

With that in mind, a publicly accessible platform on which anyone can make indelible, tamper-proof claims of ownership of their music or their contributions to a Composing or recording begins to sound like the foundation of anarchy.

The typical answer to this is that it wouldn’t be a public blockchain, it would be a ‘permission’ blockchain. It was an interesting talk because there was a middleman that controlled the blockchain and who determined who could and couldn’t add things – just like the Collective Management Organizations we have today! CMOs who require proof before they modify data will cause money to flow in. CMOs are essentially data management organizations, cleaning and enhancing data from the past seven decades of popular music, and verifying and processing new data submitted to them.

You see, when someone is in favor of licensed blockchains, they’re not really advocating a decentralized, public solution for the greater good. They are advocating your move to a very inefficient technology platform that they control and that will generate profits for their backers. So when I read articles claiming that Elon Musk was moving towards a blockchain to solve all our data problems, I took a lot of salt and started asking myself the following questions: conundrums about the motive behind such an assertion.Worldwide music business