Giving musicians the power to manage and distribute their music themselves is long overdue – now, blockchain technology offers a compelling solution to the problem.

A musicians' rights management platform is being launched by DigiRAMP, a cloud-based provider of sales and marketing intelligence for independent music businesses, leveraging Blockchain technology.

Music rights ownership and the digital distribution of music is a complicated and fragmented ecosystem in need of a protocol upgrade. The new DigiRAMP API will provide the secure issuance and distribution of digital assets, including listing and registration of musical works for clients while helping collecting societies provide more transparency and efficiency to all market participants.

The complexity of the digital music business and how you have to do the revenue consolidation and how you have to do the accounting and the splitting and how it gets more complex as you have more and more channels and devices to deal with has created the need for a comprehensive solution on a global scale.

The lack of transparency and the difficulty in being transparent requires better tools in terms of seeing all the data coming through and trying to see it on a nice dashboard and understanding exactly what needs to go to each rights owner you are in business with."

DigiRAMP has created a transparent public ledger to record all transactions, which can also be recorded on the blockchain. This is a decentralised approach to the governance of assets updated continually by a peer-to-peer network, rather than being controlled by a single entity. 

DigiRAMP has developed a way of attaching additional data onto to the coding of assets so that their transactions can execute music rights contracts in a transactional workflow: Assets with rights metadata attached to their code.

DigiRAMP solves this problem by storing the metadata on a public server and hashing the data and putting it on the blockchain.

DigiRAMP smart contracts running on top of the blockchain can execute the moment someone buys or streams a song online and also instantly and flawlessly distribution a split of assets to the artists involved - the drummer, the guy who wrote the song, whoever is a beneficiary or stakeholder- all happening in real time, while other things like expiration to a right can also be added.

Handing back the complete end-to-end management of musical rights to artists is a disruptive proposition which will have an impact on some points in the industry. Every rights owner and rights manager in that value chain will see a much more sophisticated, secure, efficient and transparent transaction.