We are developing an open public permissioned blockchain platform for managing IP rights in music and ICO platform for musicians and authors

It allows artists to tokenize their tracks, sell music tokens to fans and investors, grant commercial licenses for their music via integrated licensing marketplace and automatically receive royalties, distributed among all holders of track tokens via smart-contracts.

Users of the platform can invest in music and become co-owners of tracks by purchasing track tokens, thus being entitled to receive a share of all royalties from track licensing and to participate in track governance by voting with their track tokens.

All of the transactions in the system are made in Musereum tokens — ETM — that will be available for purchasing at selected exchanges, via fiat gateway from our website or directly from us during the token sale.

Artists and other platform users will be able to get necessary services from third-party providers (rights-clearing, promotion, video production, etc.) that can be paid for with ETM.

In order to gain public recognition, as well as to attract artists to our platform, a streaming solution — Soundchain — will enable private users to stream music from the platform free of charge, while every time the music is listened to, holders of track tokens will receive remuneration in ETM from the platform.

Our project will operate on a five-sided market, uniting artists, investors, service providers, business users and listeners in one ecosystem.

Why are we doing this?

We can help music industry overcome several major problems.

It is difficult to find information on who owns what — and that makes it harder to use music without infringing someone?s copyright.

Our blockchain being a unified database with the immutable history of all transactions will provide automatically updated information on the attribution of rights.

Transactions of all kinds (money, rights, licenses, etc.) within the industry are rarely transparent — and that creates incentive for fraudulent behaviour.

A blockchain solution makes it possible to make all of the transactions transparent and verifiable — and that makes fraudulent behaviour unreasonable.

Lots of interconnected intermediaries with complex relations between them makes it hard for rights holders to manage and control their IP.

Use of smart-contracts and automation eliminates some of the links in the value while providing a unified and versatile tool for rights holders to

Since the structure is complex and obscure, a lot of value is lost — undistributed royalties end up in black boxes, uncleared rights can be neither assigned not licensed.

With the databases of the granted licenses and of the rights holders entitled to royalties from these licenses, distributing royalties and clearing rights will become a routine task.

Complicated value chains make monetizing music hard, because distribution of royalties can take years — so those who are able to pay advances obtain power over artists.

Smart-contracts automatically and instantly distributes royalties among all the token holders, eliminating the monetization lag inherent in the current system.

Furthermore, the crowdinvesting option enables artists to raise funds by sharing their rights with fans and investors — similar to record label deals, but on artist?s conditions.

The market power of the majors make for an oligopolic market, where individual artists are forced to enter into highly restraining deals in order to get paid and be promoted.

By creating a marketplace for service providers accepting ETM tokens, we enable artists to directly request only the services they need — be it promotion, video production or managerial advice — and stay independent from majors until they make a free and informed choice to ask for a specific service.

Most of the players in the industry utilize ancient approaches to every aspect of the business — endless approvals and tons of paperwork make negotiations lengthy and expensive.

Although the structure of relations may remain as complex as participants choose it to be, traceable transactions and unified voting mechanics facilitate negotiations among network participants and provides for easier governance experience.

Thus we believe that our project can greatly increase efficiency for most music industry participants, re-enabling competition in the music market and, as a side effect, creating secondary market for IP rights.

How does the system operate?

On the technical side we have a separate blockchain based on Ethereum that utilize a Proof-of-Authority consensus mechanism similar to that implemented by Oracles.org. We use technology developed by Parity and by Oracles Network, as well as our own developments.

Two types of tokens exist within the system — the main token, ETM, that is used as an internal currency for all of the transactions within the system, and track tokens that represent shares in IP rights for a specific track.

Track tokens will be generated for each track uploaded to the platform and will be distributed among rights holders according to the metadata provided by the uploader. These tokens can be further distributed by the rights holders, who will thereby assign a proportional share of the IP rights belonging to them to the new token holder.

A token holder or a group of token holders that own 100% of tokens for a specific track constitute a DAL — a decentralized autonomous label. All of the royalties paid through the system are automatically distributed among DAL members according to the number of track tokens they hold at the time the royalty is being paid. If a member of a DAL license the music through traditional channels and the royalties are paid in fiat money, he is legally obliged to transmit a share of the royalty proportional to a share of the track tokens held by the other members of the DAL to the bank account of the Musereum operating company, that will use this money to buy ETM tokens and will distribute them among all of the other holders of track tokens. Members of the DAL can vote for specific use of the track and possible licensing terms via the Voting Dapp with the number of votes proportional to the number of tokens they hold.

ETM token will be used as the main internal currency — to buy music tokens and invest in music ICOs, to pay for licenses at the licensing marketplace and to pay industry professionals for the services they render.

A fixed amount of 250,000,000 ETM tokens is generated with the launch of the platform, and additional 25,000,000 ETM will be generated every year. ETM tokens will be initially sold to the public during the token sale, and will be traded at selected cryptocurrency exchanges after that. A fiat gateway will be introduced later for the network participants (corporations mainly) who are unwilling to deal with the crypto stuff.

How to find out more about the project?

If you are interested in the Musereum project, please visit our website, join our Telegram community and Q&A chat, subscribe to our Twitter and Facebook.

Feel free to read our White Paper and FAQ and stay tuned for the further news!