WIRED: The Music Industry Bands Together to Get Paid Online
In a recent article for Wired, contributing writer Elizabeth Stinson explores the groundbreaking history of the Open Music Initiative (OMI), formed as part of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE). It first began in 2015 when BerkleeICE founder Panos A. Panay, Berklee trustee and entrepreneur Dan Harple, and Michael Hendrix, managing director for design firm IDEO, all realized that music companies and creators alike where losing big because there was no system to properly identify rights owners.
Stinson shares how OMI's first step was to put all the major players in conversation so that they could work together. The result is an initial application programming interface (API) that allows companies to voluntarily integrate it to their systems, to help identify names of musicians and composers as well as tracking their plays. This information is then stored on a descentralized blockchain database, which allows anyone to access it without owning it.