NEW YORK and BEAVERTON, ORE. (CelebrityAccess) dotBC and Digimarc have announced that they have partnered to provide Digimarc Barcode for Audio, a digital audio watermarking technology, with the dotBC offering.
DotBC is a US-based corporation seeking to modernize media rights management by creating an open system with blockchain technology and a file container to dynamically “wrap” rights information, media files, and metadata linked to a distributed database.
Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) provides automatic recognition technologies to simplify search and transform information discovery.
“We are really excited to announce this partnership with Digimarc. This partnership enables all music industry businesses, independent creators and unsigned artists globally, to incorporate the ability to tag their audio with ownership details at the time of creation, providing an immutable connection between the audio and the always current ownership data,” said dotBC CEO Ken Umezaki. “The addition of Digimarc’s technology to our robust suite of opt-in services and solutions provides the music industry with a powerful and diverse range of choices for audio identification integrated with the blockchain.”
”dotBC combined with Digimarc Barcode for Audio provides a reliable and effective rights management solution for the music industry,” said Bruce Davis, CEO Digimarc Corporation. “The partnership between our companies showcases the power of Digimarc Barcode for Audio combined with blockchain, to ensure that rights ownership is properly and securely associated with copyrighted content.”
Earlier this year, dotBC and Digimarc gave the industry a preview of their technology by enhancing songs for an EP from singer/songwriter Anya Marina. The process for working with dotBlockchain and Digimarc’s technology is turnkey. First, metadata, including writer, co-writer, publisher, recording information, and other data is provided by the client (artist, label or publisher) and stored in an immutable ledger.
A URL is created to display the public-facing information that has been recorded on the blockchain. The audio file is then encoded to link with the URL before delivery to online stores. In Anya’s case, as she is an independent artist, this demonstrates she can now ensure all streaming services and other licensees can easily track comprehensive ownership and attribution data, thereby ensuring she is getting all of the royalties she is owed across any digital use.
DotBC’s blockchain implementation is a foundation for music and media rights expression into the works themselves. It creates a fair and transparent method for music composers, artists, publishers and rights holders to express their rights and wishes for commercializing their art into a modern and interoperable file format.
In the coming months, dotBC expects to introduce this watermarking functionality to the wider industry as one component of a suite of services available to rights holders that secure the link between the audio track and the metadata. The company has previously announced industry partners FUGA, SOCAN, MediaNet and Songtrust.
