JAAK Music Pilot Announcement

Today, we at JAAK are pleased to announce a pilot with the music industry, with participants including but not limited to BMG, Global Music Rights, Outdustry, Phoenix Music International Ltd, Sentric, Warner/Chappell Music and Warner Music Group.

I spend much of my days talking to the industry about its current challenges, whether it be licensing music services, tracking consumption or paying royalties for the tens of millions of works and recordings currently available. Over time, the industry has come to agreement that these current challenges will be alleviated by having an industry-wide view of rights, which can be attested to by the broad membership of the Open Music Initiative, but there isn’t yet agreement about how best we solve it. That’s not to say there haven’t been multiple attempts, the failure of the Global Repertoire Database (GRD) being the most bruising for the industry to date.

The team at JAAK have been working with the music industry for almost two years now, exploring how blockchain technology could help to solve many of the above challenges and, in doing so, provide the foundation and tools necessary for the industry to build upon its current growth, quickly seize new opportunities, and respond to an ever-changing digital world. We used this pilot to test our belief that public blockchains allow us to build out an industry-wide view of rights without the need to centralise both the infrastructure and control over the database, as would have been the case with the GRD. We then explored how licensing could be made more scalable when powered by an industry-wide data network, initially focusing on micro licensing small developers.

To achieve this industry-wide view of rights we are building KORD, an open shared data network which utilises the Ethereum blockchain, where users have the sole authority to insert, update and remove their own information, creating a public record of rights and an immutable audit trail.

JAAK’s aims are close to my heart, from my earliest days in music as a fresh faced graduate at Warner Music Group 12 years ago, sifting through the terrible data coming in from the early digital music services, where some services were still reporting sales based on homemade metadata with no identifiers, to my last role at Omnifone leading global licensing, where the average streaming service took 12–18 months to license and required no less than 25 licenses. After listening to a few music blockchain startups I was initially sceptical about the application of blockchain in the music industry, buried deep under 100’s of licenses I didn’t buy into the narrative that using a blockchain solution would make all the industries woes magically disappear. After meeting the team at JAAK I suddenly saw the application, it wasn’t magic, but it was a lot better than what we currently have.

I’d like to thank all those in the industry who have taken the time to help us understand the music industries challenges better and discuss JAAK’s ideas, from those who found 15 minutes to chat at a conference, to those participating in this pilot, this couldn’t have been possible without you. Not to forget the amazing support we have had from Bob and the Techstars Music team since completing the programme a year ago. We’re really proud of the progress to date, but it’s undoubted that the next stage; completing the KORD network and delivering our first products, will be our biggest hurdle yet and we look forward to working with all of you to make it a reality.

As the current music pilot nears completion, we will be moving into a broader sandbox with industry partners, which will enable us to collaborate with the industry to develop JAAK’s products and the KORD network to ensure they address real challenges.

Sign up to JAAK’s newsletter here for updates on the upcoming music industry sandbox and KORD’s newsletter here if you want to get updates.

Thanks to Dan Fowler, Lewis Marshall and Vaughn McKenzie for the comments and advice.