As a musician, I want to encourage other artists to collaborate with my music. But recently, a visual artist had all of his Vimeo videos taken down for using just 30 seconds of one of my songs. The label that exclusively licenses one of my songs likely had a bot looking for copyright infringement that automatically took it down. I hear the artist now has them back online after a few weeks of hair loss and negotiations.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a music-industry conference in possession of a good audience must be in want of a blockchain panel. Midem had one this morning as part of its copyright summit. Moderated by lawyer Sophie Goossens, it saw Bailer Music Publishing’s Benjamin Bailer; Sacem’s Xavier Costaz; Dot Blockchain’s Benji Rogers; Jaak’s Vaughn McKenzie; and Mycelia’s Carlotta de Ninni giving their views. Goossens sketched out the basic terminology: blockchain as a database

Look out for more reports throughout June on key sessions that took place at the CMU Insights conferences at The Great Escape last month. Today, we look at a presentation by Mycelia’s Head Of Research Carlotta De Ninni. She spoke at the Royalties Conference to introduce a new project Mycelia is undertaking to give better insight into how money flows through the digital music system: The Life Of A Song. The project tells the story

The 1999 launch of the file sharing service Napster was a seismic wake up call for the music industry. For many musicians and artists, the path to making a living became exponentially more challenging, particularly when it came to recorded music. Illegal downloads, declining CD sales, measly sales from legal music streaming portals and a consumer move from whole albums to single tracks all had a chilling effect on artists’ businesses. Enter the blockchain, the