Solving the delay in distributing royalties for streamed music.

Background

In the music industry, the process for distributing royalties to all of the parties that have an interest in a particular, copyrighted piece of work is complex, often involving many intermediaries. As a result, the time taken from a royalty being collected to being distributed is slow, often taking in excess of a year.

The Brief

This proof of concept explores the use of blockchain to simplify the distribution chain and to deliver royalties to copyright holders more expeditiously. A unique coin was created, which can be purchased by music consumers using FIAT or crypto-currencies. The music consumers then use the coins to pay for music at the point of consumption at rates that have been set by the copyright holder. A smart contract delivers those coins to the relevant copyright holder(s). The copyright holder can subsequently redeem FIAT or crypto in exchange for the coins.

The Technology

Ethereum was chosen as the Blockchain technology for this particular project. A private Ethereum network was set up in AWS for this POC, rather than using the public network. It is more likely that the public Ethereum network would be used for a production implementation of the system. The smart contracts were implemented in Solidity, the preferred high level language of the Ethereum platform. In addition to Ethereum for the Smart Contracts, the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) was used to store actual “.mp3” files for the copyrighted materials. A full REST API was implemented using AWS Lambda and AWS API Gateway. There were Single Page Applications built for each of the different types of user of the system. These were implemented as single page applications, using React.