Ditto Music Launches Blockchain-Based App to Eliminate Copyright Issues

Ditto Music, a leading online music distribution company that distributes music to 160 music stores around the world, including Spotify, iTunes, and others, is set to launch a blockchain-based application dubbed Bluebox, which will eliminate copyright infringement issues and enable musicians to earn more from their works, reports Billboard on January 27, 2020.

Ditto Puts Music on the Blockchain

In a bid to eliminate copyright infringement issues and enable artists to enjoy more royalties on their works, global digital distribution label services platform, Ditto Music is set to tap distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Per sources close to the matter, Ditto Music is creating an application named Blubox, which will store all the important information concerning each music as it is being recorded in the studio, including artist, songwriter, producer rights, copyrights, publishing, and mechanical splits among others.

Ditto Music has made it clear that the blockchain-based app will facilitate multiple split royalty payments for the entire lifetime of each sound recording registered on the platform and it will also accurately track plays of every registered piece of music.

A Purpose-Built Solution

Interestingly, Ditto Music has stated categorically that its blockchain solution is different from other DL-based rights databases, as it already has a use case, which is to eliminate the data management issues plaguing the music industry.

Ditto Music claims it paid out a whopping $100 million to artists as royalties in 2019 and it plans to create a publishing arm that will function alongside the Bluebox solution.

Commenting on the project, Lee Parson, CEO of Ditto noted hat:

“Many participants in the blockchain space are trying to find a problem and then trying to come up with a solution based on that. The key difference with Bluebox is that we have a massive database of artists we are going to be putting onto the blockchain.”

The Bluebox app has been under development for two years now and the firm says it’ll go live later in May 2020 and made available to is 250,000 artists around the world, including superstars like Ed Sheeran, and Chance the Rapper, among others.

Ditto Music claims it mistakenly paid out $80,000 to the wrong artist as royalty, due to an inaccurate rights metadata, however, the company firmly believes that by adopting blockchain technology, such an ugly occurrence will never happen again.

Just like in several other industries, blockchain technology has been making inroads into the music ecosystem in recent times.

In January 2019, BTCManager reported that Bitcoin mining behemoth, Bitfury has launched Bitfury Surround, a blockchain-based open-source music platform.