Faster payments for music rights holders – pilot project by Teosto, Revelator and BMAT
In an industry-first partnership, Revelator, BMAT, and Teosto, have demonstrated a new standard for paying rights holders (songwriters and music publishers) faster by processing near real-time monitoring of BMAT radio performance royalties in conjunction with Teosto’s proprietary data set and using Revelator’s Data Management Platform & Original Works’ smart contract-powered Artist Wallet.
The pilot, organized in the summer of 2019, followed the radio plays of three works on Finnish radio channels. Teosto provided the metadata, splits and user information for 3 songs and 19 rights holders.
Revelator queries BMAT for radio plays of those 3 songs several times per day. Whenever new radio plays were reported, Teosto used the Original Works Network to transfer the royalty payments to the smart contract that represents the underlying musical work.
The smart contracts automatically and immediately disseminated the payments to the digital wallets of the rights holders. There is a wallet for each of the rights holders involved; payments are made in Original Works tokens, which rights holders would be able to convert to the fiat currencies of their choice once the project reaches the production stage. The pilot was done with simulating the payments in a test blockchain environment and. No real money was distributed during testing.
From technological perspective, faster payments pilot was a success.
“The most important result is that we really are able to show royalty payments within 24 hours to different right-holders. The promise of near-real time payments is huge but still realistic, says Turo Pekari, Teosto’s Senior Advisor of Innovation.
The project is presented on 12 September at Future Music Forum in Barcelona together with Teosto, Revelator and BMAT for a high-level music industry audience.
Pekari explains that going forward to production will need a careful assessment of the needs of Teosto’s right holders and business logics as well as to further develop integrations. analytics and UI for the tested solution.
“Our goal is to take our services to the next level and experiments like this are part of it. We hope that in the next few years, faster payments for music creators will become everyday business.”
See the event: http://futuremusicforum.com/opalsingleevent-session/paying-songwriters-within-24-hours-rather-than-2-years/
ABOUT BMAT
BMAT started in 2005 focused around music monitoring services and built a service that could track any public communication of music. Today BMAT monitoring platform delivers 92 million identifications monthly and overviews 230M digital transactions hourly.
ABOUT REVELATOR
Revelator is a leading provider of copyright and data services for today’s digital music business. Revelator’s digital asset platform and artist wallet offers a best in class solution for simplifying copyright management, and solves the complex problems of accurate attribution in multi-territorial rights administration and transparency in royalty distributions to copyright owners and independent music creators.