The posts on the Open Music Initiative blog are the sole opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent the position of the members of the Open Music Initiative.
Since before the pandemic hit, the Berklee-MIT members of the Open Music team have been pushing on RAIDAR, a working, student-led model to show vs tell the principles and protocols of Open Music. We demo’ed RAIDAR in person at the NYC Summit in 2019 and continued building, doubling down when the pandemic hit.
Read MoreIt’s better to show than to tell. One of the most satisfying projects I’ve worked on over the past years has been Berklee’s RAIDAR. RAIDAR is a licensing platform that allows Berklee students, alums and faculty to upload music to a blockchain-based database where those in need of music can quickly, fairly, and transparently license works.
RAIDAR, a new licensing platform, makes it easier for student musicians to earn money from their songs and retain full control over their work.
Read MoreNicole d'Avis, managing director of Berklee's Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship, spoke about RAIDAR (Rights and Asset Information in Decentralized, Authoritative Repositories) at Imagination in Action's meeting at the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos.
Read MoreThank you to all the members who came out for a packed meeting in New York on November 13, 2019. We appreciate the many guests who joined us: Susan Whitehead, Board Chair for Berklee College of Music an Life Member of the MIT Corporation; Alex “Sandy” Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media, Arts and Sciences and Director of MIT Connection Science; John R. Riley, Assistant General Counsel, U.S. Copyright Office; panelists Carlotta De Ninni, CEO, Creative Passport, Jessica Sobhraj, CEO & Founder, Cosynd and Daniel Dewar, CEO & Founder, Paperchain, and our guests from Lesley University, Matthew Nash, Chair, Digital Filmmaking and Heather Shaw, Chair, Graphic, Interactive and User Experience Design, Lesley University. It was incredibly inspiring and rewarding to see the mix of many familiar faces and new members coalescing around the mission of Open Music and giving valuable feedback on the Berklee/MIT technical prototype.
The meeting ended with an overwhelmingly positive vote of confidence for Open Music to become a standalone, member-supported organization. We would like to give a very heartfelt thank you and congratulations to the many members who helped move this conversation forward and who gave their support!
Read MoreOne of the significant issues in the music supply chain today is the lack of consistent, complete and authoritative information or metadata regarding the creation of a given musical work. In many cases multiple entities in the music supply chain have each created their own version of the metadata for a musical work, often by manually re-entering the same information or through scraping data from other sites. In such cases, the effort to synchronize or to correct the information becomes manually laborious and error-prone. Furthermore, confidential information regarding the legal ownership of the musical work is often commingled in the same metadata, making the entire database proprietary and thus closed. In this paper we explore an alternative model for creation metadata following the open access paradigm found in other industries, such as in book publishing, library systems and in the automotive parts supply chain. The vision is to create a new music metadata layer for creation metadata that is open, scalable and provides an authoritative source of information that is available to all entities in the music supply chain globally.
Read MoreI love music, really LOVE music, and I’m guessing you do too. Remember what it was like when your favorite artist released an album? Or waiting in an actual line to get tickets for their concert? The t-shirts you still own from those concerts? I have them too.
This is why we created Open Music. It’s worth remembering that. Over the years, as we’ve immersed ourselves in bylaws and API’s, it has been too easy to forget.
Read MoreLast week, I visited Lesley University with Open Music’s George Howard and Berklee / Open Music Graduate Fellow Meghan Gaudet, and met with 60+ film and animation students to hear their thoughts on a prototype we’ve been building.
I asked, “Raise your hand if you would pay $10 for the music for your films. Keep them raised if you’d pay $20. $30? $40?. . . . $150?” The last hand went down.
Read MoreGuest post by Chris Kulis, Open Music High School Intern
This summer, as we received your feedback and updated the bylaws and other governance documents, Berklee and MIT Connection Science jointly accelerated the development of technical prototypes by working with a grassroots collective of artists, students, grad fellows, technologists, and industry veterans. Chris Kulis is a high school senior who we originally met in 2017 in the Berklee/Brown High School Summer Program. He visited our Open Music Summer Lab through a design thinking workshop at IDEO, with Caribbean artists participating via our partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank. Chris continued to follow Open Music, and reached out this summer with an interest in interning. He now participates in weekly team calls, providing valuable input from his perspective as a young artist, producer and manager, and learning about music rights, blockchain and open source development. As we prepare for our November member meeting, we are thrilled to share Chris’s reflections on Open Music.
Read MoreThe Open Music Initiative Los Angeles Meeting on February 6 started with an insightful panel from four very different musicians: Adam Dorn, Holly Palmer, David Rosenthal, and Steve Vai. Open Music co-founder and Berklee VP of Innovation and Strategy Panos A. Panay steered the conversation of Berklee alums from their process as business people and as artists, and how technology affects their work. There were too many great moments to recount them all here, but this one thought from Steve Vai set the tone of the day, “Too many musicians approach new technology saying ‘that s**t sucks, it's ruined my career,’ instead of ‘how can it serve me?’ - and then, ‘how can I make it better?’” Open Music is about making it better.
Read MoreThank you to the over 150 members who joined us for the first Open Music Annual Summit on November 15-16, 2018 in New York, enjoying keynotes by Desmond Child and Imogen Heap; an MMA panel with top reps from DiMA, NMPA, RIAA, and producer Hank Shocklee; presentations by MIT Connection Science, PwC, URights, Blokur, Gusto and IBM, to name a few; plus governance updates, and working group meetings focused on the board, technology, implementation, and education. Stay tuned for more updates, including a recap of the Summit, upcoming governance sessions, working group calls, board structure, and our next Open Music meeting in February. For now, enjoy this visual recap of a few Summit highlights.
Read MoreWhite paper by Panos A. Panay, VP Innovation & Strategy, Berklee College of Music; Alex Pentland, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Thomas Hardjono, Research Scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The passage of the Music Modernization Act into law is a major milestone and opportunity for the music industry to usher in a new era of growth and innovation. Major credit goes to the individuals and organizations who worked tirelessly to pass this legislation including the National Association of Music Publishers, the Digital Media Association, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the many independent publishers, songwriting groups, and other creative industry advocates. With the establishment for the first time of a legal framework authorizing a single comprehensive, accessible database that connects copyright owners of both sound recordings and compositions, the industry can move to a new phase: one in which rights holders’ data can be secure yet interoperable across databases, systems, and applications through shared, open standards.
To read more, and download the PDF version of Open Music’s white paper, please click through and provide the requested information.
Read MoreGuest post whitepaper and invitation by Alex Pentland, John Werner, and Chris Bishop, from the MIT Trust::Data Consortium for blockchain+AI research.
We find ourselves at a unique point in history, a moment in time when new technologies are emerging at an unprecedented pace. Specifically, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robots, and Internet of Things (IoT) are combining to create a new wave of change as they begin to take advantage of cryptocurrencies, ICOs, virtual assets, the blockchain and the tokenization of everything. The result of this collision of technologies and human organizations is hand-wringing about job loss, fear of robot overlords, and worries about Armageddon.
But it is easy to get caught up in the hype of the moment, to get swept up by what the media and technorati are saying about what is happening - who it will impact, what the impact will be and what winners and losers will emerge. While there is certainly potential for tremendous change, both good and bad, 90% of what is being written about blockchain and artificial intelligence today is hype or unrealistic, overinflated postulation. What is really going on?
Read MoreGuest post by Roger H. Brown, President of Berklee
I recently sent the following letter to Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward J. Markey in support of the Music Modernization Act. Berklee, and our Open Music Initiative, are advocating for a creative industry that fairly compensates its artists and empowers them to have successful, sustainable careers.
Read MoreOpen Music is a coordinating agent. This ethos expands out beyond our commitment to the coordination and interoperability of tech via open source APIs, and extends to the coordination of ideas and relationships. To this end, with the help of Ace Hotel, we designed this particular event to combine these various coordinating aspects, convening OMI members with Berklee alumni, local London artists and music industry entrepreneurs.
Read MoreThe first question I was asked on the excellent panel discussion that was held in a building called - I kid you not - The Mozarteum in Salzburg was, “George, why are you here?” That’s a pretty fair question to ask of me in almost any situation, but particularly apt given the fact that it was a Wednesday in Salzburg Austria...and I live and work in Boston. My answer to this question, however, summed up an awful lot about what made the most recent Open Music Initiative project at the Karajan Music Tech Conference so unique. I answered, “I go where the energy goes, and for the past several days, the energy has been in Salzburg.”
Read MoreOpen Music hosted its first public event on February 27 in New Orleans, in partnership with Ace Hotels. Artists, entrepreneurs, and curious fans were joined by Open Music’s Panos Panay and George Howard, as well as Peter Guglielmino, IBM’s Media & Entertainment CTO. Open Music members have previously met to focus on cross-industry negotiations, interoperability and API’s, but this was the first time that Open Music held an event focused directly on artists and the creative community, keeping music and artistry at the center.
Read MoreGuest post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, former VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM.
Just about every industry has been significantly transformed in the past few decades. But few have been as disrupted as the music industry. Everything seems to be changing at once, from the way content is produced and delivered, to the sources of revenue and profits. Digital technologies, - the Internet, smartphones, cloud computing, … - have literally turned dollars into pennies. Now, blockchain and related technologies may once more play a major role in the music industry, - this time helping to turn those pennies back into dollars.
Read MoreHappy New Year, everyone. It’s hard to believe that Open Music was launched just a short 18 months ago given the incredible progress that we have been able to make together.
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