Yes. Encouraging. I reached out to them. My folks have been working on the back end trying to help solve the IP problem and we understand the pushback with blockchain. I think the publishing answer is with blockchain though. The free and open or V4V is also a very hard sell on the artist side. The average album costs 12,000 USD and hoping people send value isn’t the best business strategy either. You’ve probably found here in Nostrland that many people disagree with me on this. BUt we absolutely need a return to music being valued, not free.
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Glad that you reached out to them, they also run discord and telegram channels. I too am convinced that blockchain is a large part of a better ecosystem for music rights management. It is not a surprise that SACEM (the french PRO that also runs ASCAP in the US and PRS in UK) is using blockchain (Tezos, I believe) for their date-proofing system called MusicStart, which is free to use for their members. Even in a decentralized blockchain-based system, they probably still would be needed (as a digital signature) for identity checks.
Totally agree also on the valuation of music. My opinion is that it's not actually music that is undervalued but music recordings, which are a slightly different thing. When I started in this business, in the mid 80's, recording an album cost far more than 12k, more like the price of a house. And, from the label's perspective, the recording budget represented from 2 to 8% of the total production cost as you had to add manufacturing objects (vinyls and cd's and cassettes), shoot a video-clip (and that would cost as much as recording, mixing and mastering the whole album) and pay the promotion in the hope that journalists would like the music so you could finally reach the public. Technology has hopefully short-circuited most of this but with side-effects. And like in any domain, the retail price is somehow linked to the production cost, and the latter has been reduced to next to none, especially since Suno, Udio and the likes.
All that being said, I'm very hopeful that this situation will lead the public to value more the music in itself, especially in direct live moments, probably largely improvised, so one knows that what they're witnessing did not exist before and will not happen ever again afterwards. DJ sets and improvised electronic music performances are a good example of that, imo.
Sorry for such a rant...