Registration

Registration

Opening Remarks by Conference Chairman, Billy Mello

Standardizing and consolidating data in the music industry to enable increased revenues

Industry realities in royalty management: the status quo with data and complexity. What do we want from data in the music industry? Where is the right balance of publicity and privacy? What are the possible solutions to current issues in tech: blockchain? AI? What does the industry need to do to introduce new technologies such as blockchain?

A rights data repository for transparent and fair compensation to creative rights holders - success or failure?

Solving the metadata chaos is always based on assumptions from existing businesses and keeps an eye on systems and processes which are hard to change. But how would a system look like, when artists and authors are in the centre, everything is made to generate transparency and the focus is set on easy and effective licensing? Can more new businesses and applications bring more money to the data centre? Can new frameworks substitute the old paradigms completely and what are there new roles servicing artists and authors in an ideal new world?

Using Blockchain to tracks plays and royalty payments

Current challenges for the industry: complicated regulations, old infrastructure, intransparency, 3rd world piracy. The potential of Blockchain to ensure seamless, transparent and fast royalty distribution alongside with free streaming. Proposed solutions by SounDAC and Peertracks. Potential impact to the artists, rights holders and industry as a whole.

Panel discussion: Overcoming issues in partnerships along the music value chain

What do we need to improve the communication between a big number of industry players involved in copyright management? How shall we facilitate the data exchange between all the value chain participants? How can we improve current practices to make record business profitable again?

Networking Luncheon

Keynote: How the Hipgnosis Songs Fund is transforming the music industry

Traditionally the main investors in the industry are labels, who collectively spend around 4,5 billion USD in A&R and marketing activities annually. The amounts needed to break an artist in a major market, such as the USA or UK vary from 0,5 to 2 million USD. It is a very capital intensive business, but also a profitable one. This set up naturally leads to a monopolistic market structure, where few players dominate it. As a consequence, remuneration is distributed in a very unbalanced way: creators tend to receive only about 8% from the revenues, while being the most important part of the value chain. Merck set up an investment fund, Hipgnosis Songs Fund LTD, to deal with this situation. He will tell why private investment into music makes sense, share his vision on the future of music as an asset and elaborate on how he is planning to balance the revenue distribution with his initiative.

Indie label 2.0: turning music into community asset with help of AI and Blockchain

Due to the content abundance we need smarter ways of understanding the market and funding the records. We found a way how to validate the songs before launching them to the market and how to use power of community to co-found the records. We will discuss how it works and how we apply AI and Blockchain to do that.

How digital A&R changed the artist-industry relations and what is coming next?

Several digital A&R projects, using data, AI and machine learning disrupted the A&R practices and made the way for more artists to be mentioned and labels to discover and monitor performance of the artists. What are the real impacts of this – how easier is it now for the artist to be mentioned? What commercial impact does it have for labels? How did it change the relations between artists, labels and publishers? And most importantly: what is the next step in artist-industry relations?

The role of marketplaces for artists in music industry

How does developing the artists work in a marketplace? What would happen if an online community of independent musicians would take these roles? How does an artist driven platform work and what can it become? What can the independent artists achieve together to help themselves be heard?

Reimagining A&R and helping musicians thrive

This talk concentrates on how the A&R can be reimagined with the help of the community. The artists are being developed, the smart algorythm on the basis of AI help identifying next stars and helps the artists to be mentioned by labels. Labels get a reliable tool to identify investment opportunities.