Libby Landenberg

The music industry is built on an outdated system of data collection, rights management and royalty payments. My project replaces this system with an innovative, fair and transparent solution, bringing clarity of the music payment process to every user.

With the focus of the digital music industry being on monetising the production of music; ownership rights, access to digital sales data and other major problems are often overlooked. Artists are unaware and unable to ascertain their immediate digital sales data, and digital service providers such as Apple Music and Spotify conceal how they calculate royalty payments; some providers do not pay out and in 2015 SoundCloud was sued for lost millions in unpaid royalties.

As if this wasn’t enough, the Performing Rights Society monopolise the royalty payment distribution in the UK. They do not protect or support the artists who find themselves unable to contest their payments on an individual basis, creating a landscape filled with uncertainty.

Cubic is a blockchain based solution for the music industry, focused on solving problems of ownership rights, royalty calculation and distribution, and transparency.

Built on the Ethereum protocol, Cubic utilises a network of smart contracts to digitally facilitate, verify, and enforce contracts, negating the need for third party mediators, in this case royalty collection agencies. A smart contract is a computer system that encodes terms for a deal enabling the outcome to occur automatically when the conditions are met. These transactions are traceable and irreversible. 

Utilising the power of blockchain technology, Cubic ensures that all artists get paid exactly what they are owed, whilst also enabling artists to use each other's work, and the use of the content to be tracked and paid for accordingly.