Ujo Music

Transcript

so hi everybody my name is Phil berry and I'm one of the founders of boo Joe which is a decentralized music platform built on aetherium especially various people involved in project here today Simon did Olivier did a talk on tokens before Christian Leung Chris has helped out and there's all kinds of other people here Russell etc but I have a confession to make which is that I am NOT a developer and not a coder and not an architect I'm not a cryptographer I'm not a technologist at any kind whatsoever so I apologized what I appreciate is a fundamental failing on my part in attending this conference is a non non tech but my background is in the music industry and I started out music almost exactly ten years ago working in record

companies I then embarked on a career as a as a musician and ultimately set up my own independent record company and after eight years on the creative side of the music business I kind of achieve lots of things that I dreamt of doing when I was growing up you know I performed on TV I'd played all the major festivals I'd played in 13 countries and I make almost zero money doing this and as I came to kind of two realizations the first one was probably I was slightly deficient on the talent front and the second one was you know something was up with the music industry and so for the last couple of years I've really been focused on working out what exactly it is this up with the music industry and trying to

come up with some solutions last year I was involved in a project working with Radiohead and Thom Yorke I spent several months working on a record that he released through BitTorrent on that project and then I eventually heard about blockchain and went through the process of you know heavenly angels singing that all of us have had and then I'm you know Here I am so let's start at the beginning because to understand the problems that face the music industry today you kind of have to understand that what was going on at the beginning of the 20th century when this was the height of Technology because the core institutions that form the basis of the

music industry's infrastructure like PRS and ASCAP actually were born around the same time that this ship the Titanic was sinking on its maiden voyage in the ocean and so that tells you almost everything you need to know you know this was a world before globalization before digital and institutions and systems that were created before you could talk to somebody on this other side of Atlantic by the telephone and now being asked to handle a hyper-connected digital global marketplace with billions of transactions and where payments and not dollars but micro sense or in summary if someone says to you music writes you

just have to think sinking ship so if we could dig into this globalization point you know if you think about the world of the Titanic it took weeks or months to travel from one continent to another and so people generally traded in their own continents their own local markets and the people that sent ships across the oceans in these times intermediated between these different markets and they did very well out of it well today I can upload my video to YouTube and before-breakfast it can be watched in 50 countries but actually the systems the processes the structure of the music industry still looks like those 20th century shipping routes and so here we have an example

this is what happens if you're in a if you are a American songwriter down the bottom here whose song is played on the radio in a country somewhere else so perhaps Japan and this isn't even cover the recording rights or the performers or the producer any of that this is just the song and it assumes one songwriter which is very rare but it just give you an example of just how many intermediaries exist at the end of the day the songwriter is getting about half of the value of their music and it takes them up to two years to get ahold of this money and this is just absurd in the in the new modern world and at the same time we have this

explosion in in digital has been a massive revolution in music industry such that we're no longer selling CDs with 10 songs on them worth $20 we're now selling a single play of half of one song and we're selling that for a tiny tiny fractions of cents as the result the amount of data that needs to be processed is doubling every year there are hunt literally hundreds of billions of music uses taking taking place every year and one single hit song think of your you know your favorite Rihanna or Taylor Swift song this has this kind of songs have 700,000 individual revenue streams

that's one song generating 700,000 different revenue streams and so it's pretty clear that we're entering a totally new paradigm in terms of the amount of data that needs to be processed and since the way that people listen to music and in terms of Hutton's of systems and processes they're going to be required in order to deal with this kind of music industry and all of this is said against just a ridiculous background of complexity in who owns what in music this is a piece of music called what by Big Sean I've never heard it but I'm told that it's a really strong piece of work and it has 20 it has you know 20 plus people who all own some you know from 1.8% up to 20% of this song and what's amazing is that

there is no definitive record of this information so every record company every Performing Rights Society has their own version and they really have a hard time agreeing which version of the information is correct and if you're an artist or a songwriter well the problem is if they don't agree you don't get paid or maybe the wrong person gets paid and you don't get paid ok well that's probably enough winding enough complaining about the problems in music they we should start thinking about some solutions and basically I think blockchain if you're in blockchain has two main parts of solution first is a definitive decentralized database of music rights of who owns what

solves the problem on the previous page a secondary secondly an automated smart contract based licensing system and the project that we are working on Oh Joe takes these core principles and then comes up with four basic areas of functionality first the decentralized database part people publish rights information on blockchain along with use policies for how that music can be used so now we have a single source of information that everybody can use second anybody can use the music as long as they follow the terms of those use policies and this is actually a fundamentally different approach to

licensing which is not about control and holding onto content but is saying let's let content fly through the world and people can use it freely as long as they meet the terms set by the people that created that content and third and at the core of the automated automation piece is that people get paid automatically using a smart contract when the music is used and on the other in the other direction the permission to use music the license is also transferred by some contract and finally this is core infrastructure so it's designed to be open and adaptable to almost any use anybody can come up with

a new business model a new app a new service for music can plug into this and make use of the content and the flows of the flows of licenses etc within this so last month we release the prototype in collaboration with the grammy-winning artist Imogen Heap and this is a single song test case for a new kind of music industry might look like if it was built on the blockchain and as I just described we have a set of policies attached to the song which are the terms under which music can be used and also the details the share of revenue that is owned by each of the

stakeholders so each different use a stream a download or a sink might have different use terms associated with it and different splits in this case we can see that image and receiver you know ninety percent of a download you know it seems a lot but it's fair given that she's a songwriter the publisher the record label the performer the producer the artist everything else and then non featured artists will each receive in the region of 1% each this is kind of an industry standard figure so now I know not knowing this information we can now test it out by purchasing a download here we

use the light wallet that Christian from consensus made and therefore all I got to do to purchase this song is enter a password I have the light wallet loaded and then the song starts downloading automatically the ephah price is updated using an Oracle it's made by Simon and therefore the price and u.s. dollars is always the same which is attractive to an artist in the current world who you know just wants to receive dollars frankly so I can let me see a transparent list of transactions that

have all taken place what Cheney can tell that I recorded this video three times with I'm the last person to make the glass to me transactions and this is a you know fully transparent record of whoever's interacted with this music and then we have under distributions these are the outcomes of the smart contract being enacted based on the policies so we can see that Imogen did get paid what she should have got paid and we can see that all the the non featured artists got paid what they should have got paid and so we can see exactly where the money going and I can follow the tread thread transparently from start to finish be confident that everybody is being paid what they should be in accordance with the policy and the smart contract

and this prototype is live now you Joe music calm so feel free to go and blow your point seven of an Easter download this song and it's you know up there semi-permanently so the prototype is clearly limited in scope but the net effect of all of this is that we can create a fully automated licensing system that directly addresses the structural problems in the music industry and what which we genuinely believe can wreak untold havoc on the old way of doing things it is fundamental shared infrastructure that allows creators and their customers to

do business with confidence and free of intermediaries so perhaps we'll have time for questions in a moment but first I just want to say something about adoption of this kind of a system because one of those compelling arguments that people put in music against this kind of thing is that it is simply unrealistic to expect rights holders to unpick all of their hundred years of contracts and jump on board with this and you know when you think about this it is actually quite a depressing thought but fortunately when I said compelling what I really meant was really quite flawed and here's why it's because today there are 30 million songs on Spotify but in the next decade

they're going to be a hundred million songs on Spotify and that is not just all the new songs are going to be written all the new bands that are going to be formed but it's all the remixes and samples and derivative works to the user-generated content that are going to be brought online over this time and so it turns out we don't actually have to solve this problem for the 30 million songs that go back into history we just have to solve them for the 70 million songs they're gonna happen in the future and these things are free of you know free of all these attachments from the past and the same applies the video every single minute is it every single minute 30 yeah every single minute 35 hours of video content uploaded to

YouTube so in the next decade we're talking about 130 million hours of video you know we can make a total great with the past cause the past is going to look like a small minority of content in ten years time and here's something else it turns out that lots of the institutions that we would like to disrupt or a place are actually owned and controlled and run for the interests of songwriters publishers and artists and those songwriters an artists are not happy with the status quo and so yes we've already worked with an independent artist in Imogen Heap we're currently working on a joint project with an artist who has had two

top 20 albums in the US but we're also already working with all of that not all of them a large number of the big institutions and music the people that really control things and that's why because the pressure from artists and writers is real and it's not just about music because music is a raw ingredient that is used in film in TV and games in your vines and so what we're talking about here is a totally new paradigm for content and all content creators and I really believe that we are within touching distance of achieving that so thank you very much they don't have a very quick question while they work out

with this time for it question so this is come out of the consensus organization which is an indeterminate number between 50 and something above that and I suppose and the people that works on the prototype was sort of a calling for about five you know back end contract stuff front end development in graphic design you know me doing waiting my hands around kind of thing how does Imogen Heap feel about Howard oddly I think one of the things that I find the most interesting about it is

that having come having fully embraced this idea of transparency and full transparency I think that it is quite a shock to suddenly have people be able to see how much of the income she's receiving and that's just an interesting dynamic that wake up having to explore and it but it's sort of what it proves is that if it's transparent it has to be right and so she's kind of really thinking hard it's really making her think hard about what should what should artists get in a few shorts but it should non featured artists get it cetera um so that's interesting you'd have to ask him agenda for her own view on it thank you