The following is contributed by Joe Conyers and Alex Kane of Songtrust.
Worldwide, the music publishing industry is in the business of collecting and distributing money to songwriters and copyright holders. This hundred year old business is using technology based on mainframe computers to disseminate song/composition/composer identification and ownership data to hundreds of third parties. New methods of media distribution(Digital Streaming) have increased the complexity of distributing the collected funds in an accurate way. We’re looking at blockchain as a solution for storing and querying composition ownership data. This document is an attempt to articulate the needs of the publishing industry from our point of view.
A given composition, or work, will have the following attributes which are important to track. A complete set of data for a given composition must include all of these fields: