Berklee Partners with MIT to Help Students Get Paid for Their Music

Berklee has long advocated for the creation of a more open and transparent music business, one that gives artists more control over their music, their data, and ultimately their careers. When the college formed the Open Music Initiative (OMI) in 2016 with Netflix, YouTube, and dozens of other industry players, it set out to do just that.

OMI’s first priority: fixing the transfer of music metadata—the full information about an artist’s work, including the musicians, songwriters, producers, labels, and publishers involved in its creation—to ensure that when a song is played, the right people get paid and credited. The industry’s lack of standardized protocols for copyright attribution and royalty allocation have led to a tangled mess of licensing deals, rules, and intermediaries, resulting in error-filled royalty statements and millions in lost or misallocated royalties, leaving artists unpaid for their work.

The solution, according to OMI, was to develop an industry-wide framework linking artists and rights-holders to their works through a network of ledgers—an open-source model that has proven successful in the book publishing, auto parts, and library systems industries.

Berklee’s new licensing platform, RAIDAR is just such a framework, putting the initiative’s values and technical principles into practice. Built using blockchain technology, and designed in collaboration with MIT Connection Technology, RAIDAR allows Berklee students to license their music to visual-media students at other schools. RAIDAR is being piloted with the digital-filmmaking program at Lesley University, with plans to expand the platform not only to other film schools, but to other markets such as virtual reality and video games.

The platform uses smart contracts—agreements that self-execute when specific conditions are met—to eliminate the need for costly middlemen. And, unlike many music libraries, RAIDAR doesn’t act as a publisher or take a cut from its users; artists and rights-holders retain full control of their music, earning money from their songs wherever and whenever they are used.

Berklee students and alumni worked with MIT to design and code the project. Meghan Smyth M.M. ’19, a graduate of Berklee’s campus in Valencia, Spain, helped to integrate the platform with Berklee’s identity-validation system, and created the user-experience design for its educational materials. She first learned about OMI during Berklee’s Silicon Valley student trip, then started attending the tech calls with MIT that led to RAIDAR.

To learn more, we talked to RAIDAR cofounders George Howard, professor of music business at Berklee, and Nicole d’Avis, managing director of the Berklee Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE). Read excerpts from the interview here.