There are very few people left to deny that the general idea of a BlockChain; i.e. sharing a ledger between multiple parties in a decentralized manner to keep everyone honest, is revolutionary and will be useful in our global society
A BlockChain, at its simplest level, is just a corruption-resistant string of ledger entries shared over a network by multiple parties
There is an important distinction to be made between the 2 approaches of BlockChain architecture, namely private or public BlockChains.
In terms of definitions, a public BlockChain is seen as a democratic approach where all the nodes or computers in the network decide by consensus what information is the correct version of truth to be recorded on the BlockChain. An well-known example of this is the BlockChain of Bitcoin. This has proven to be the most successful application of Blockchain which has survived numerous hacking attempts and security breaches
Private or Permissioned BlockChains are on the opposite side of the scale in that the participants in the system are invited or given access to the information in the BlockChain secured behind firewall protocols.
Most of the interest in BlockChains from the Financial services industry has focused on the use case of permissioned BlockChains which provides greater compliance to existing financial regulations and bodies
At its heart, a public BlockChain values anonymity, immutability, and transparency. In the world of digital rights assertion and management in Music, where the exposure of the true owner of those assets is crucial, then the use of a public, permissionless BlockChain provides the most effective approach to ensure that the issues of rights ownership and validity in music are fully addressed.
Private BlockChain certainly has it application in certain scenarios, but its approach whereby a group of industry players dictate the terms of the interactions between the participants seems a lot like the current music industry model with all its woes.
We believe in full transparency so that a public BlockChain becomes the ‘source of truth’ of rights assertion so that ownership (and the rewards that accrue as a result of rights ownership) is never in doubt
This ensures all musicians, artists and other music creatives, derive full benefits from their work and efforts in bringing music (and other creative works) to the public
Also published on Medium.
