Spotlight: The Music Fund
An in depth look at some of the projects building on Parcel.
For the next few months, Oasis Labs will be showcasing each of our customers that are currently building on Parcel in a series called Spotlights. Our aim is to introduce the passionate teams behind each project while also giving an in-depth look at the many different use cases that Parcel enables.
Parcel is a set of privacy-first, data governance APIs that allow you to give your users better control over how their data is used. With Parcel, you’re able to securely and effectively store and use sensitive data, define and enforce policies over data, all while maintaining and sharing tamper-proof logs to better provide transparency and communication with your users.
The Music Fund (TMF) is one of our exciting new partners. We love the idea of empowering users to have control over their data rights and ultimately, their creative identities. We’ve asked John Funge, CEO at TMF, to give some background as to how he found Oasis Labs and how Parcel helps TMF create better opportunity for artists in the music and entertainment space.
Hey, John! Tell us a little bit about The Music Fund!
The Music Fund provides financial services for the new creator economy, built on algorithmic forecasting. Independent creators are a rapidly-growing market but underserved by traditional banking. A data-driven algorithmic approach can forecast income, quantify risk, and offer actionable advice. We proved our approach with automated advances to streaming musicians and now we are expanding to other creative industries.
Why is privacy and data sovereignty important for your product?
Our algorithmic forecasting needs data to make predictions about future streaming and income. That data includes past earnings and streaming data which can be highly sensitive, private information that artists share with us.
How did you find out about Oasis Labs?
I have known Dawn Song, CEO of Oasis Labs, since I started a project on differential privacy at a previous company. I was fascinated by her academic research and was excited when she started Oasis Labs and saw an immediate application to the work we were doing at The Music Fund.
How do you use Parcel?
Parcel was a good fit for us because it enabled us to quickly and easily give artists a way to share sensitive streaming and financial information with us while maintaining their privacy and sovereignty over the data. The first feature we implemented was allowing artists to securely share their login credentials with us so that they maintained control and had visibility into how they were used. Going forward, we plan to use Parcel to store sensitive streaming and financial data. Longer term, we are excited by the idea that artists can share that data with companies we partner with in a way that protects their privacy while giving them access to a wide variety of products and services.
What’s your favorite thing about Parcel!
Our favorite thing about Parcel is how easy it is to use, with just a few API calls we had implemented our first feature. The most exciting feature is how it will enable us to create a whole new ecosystem of financial and analytics services to support the new creative economy.
Who / what inspires you?
I’m inspired by the artists who are building the new creative economy. Artists who have been able to use the latest tools and services to put their content on platforms like YouTube, Spotify and Steam. They have brought entertainment and insight to millions and I hope that The Music Fund will be able to provide the financial services they need to continue and expand their work.
If you’re interested in learning more about The Music Fund, head to their website: https://themusic.fund/ or tweet them at @themusicfund.
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