The licensing and data firm is ending 2022 with a deal to provide a copyright hub for independent publishing licensing agency IMPEL.
Tag: Blokur
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Olivia Rodrigo was 2021’s top songwriter – but only 15% of the top 100 were women
Startup Blokur has released its second ‘Songwriters’ Review’ report, based on its analysis of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube.
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Blokur boss talks music data and startup challenges
Blokur CEO Phil Barry has been talking about the startup’s evolution, in an appearance at the Music Ally China Digital Summit this morning.
The company now processes data for around 70m songs from “trillions of streaming interactions” for its major and independent music clients, as well as for digital music services.
“We’ve created all these brilliant ways of distributing content around the world, but we haven’t seen the same revolution in the way that the value comes back to the creator,” he said. “Blokur is trying to fill that gap.”
The company has built its database of music rights, and a system for matching usage of music on digital services to the underlying compositions.
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Tones and I tops Blokur’s 2020 songwriter streaming rankings
Startup Blokur has been analysing the top 100/200 charts on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music in an attempt to rank songwriters by the performance of their songs […]
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Blokur analysed 100 livestreams for publishing copyrights
Twitch may be catching most of the flak right now from music rightsholders, but questions around livestreams and licensing apply much further than the Amazon-owned company. One thing that would help rightsholders and collecting societies to figure out licensing is hard data on the songs being streamed, and how many people are hearing / watching them.
Enter British startup Blokur, which has published the results of a recent study it conducted with audio-recognition firm DJ Monitor. The study monitored 100 popular livestreams – DJ Soda and John Digweed are the two mentioned, so we’d surmise the emphasis was on DJ sets – identified the tracks, then used Blokur’s technology to match those recordings to publishing copyrights.
“In the 100 livestreams, we identified a combined more than 500 million views of our clients’ songs, split between around 30 of Blokur’s publisher clients,” wrote Blokur boss Phil Barry in his summary of the results. “And depending on the territory and the licensing arrangements, those views are worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to some of our clients. That’s money that otherwise would have made its way into the black box.”
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Publishing-rights platform Blokur emerges from beta mode
The last time we heard from startup Blokur, it was helping Massive Attack track remix rights using blockchain technology in December 2018. However, the British company has also been building its business to […]
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Massive Attack test remix-rights tracking with blockchain startup Blokur
If you’ve not seen Massive Attack’s Fantom app, it’s well worth having a play with: one of the best explorations of how music can be made interactive for fans that we’ve seen.
This week, the app has been relaunched to tie in with the 20th anniversary activity around the band’s album ‘Mezzanine’, with new interactive remixes of the album’s tracks.
Fans can play with the music and make their own “sensory remixes” using the camera, touchscreen gestures and motion signals, as well as sampling sounds from the world around them and creating videos.
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20 music/tech startups we’ll be watching in 2018
Here at Music Ally, we covered a lot of new music/tech startups for the first time in 2017. We’ve now chosen 20 of them that we think have the potential to make an impact in 2018 and beyond, from analytics to artificial intelligence, and from blockchain tech to radio monitoring.
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Blockchain music: rights, artists and ‘the big spreadsheet in the sky’ (#SlushMusic)
Jaak is one of the startups exploring the potential that blockchain technology has for the music industry. The company is working on a number of pilot schemes, and its CEO […]
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Blokur talks blockchain music: ‘The technology on its own is not the whole picture’
A reminder that the Venn diagram of ‘music people’ and ‘blockchain startup people’ is not a pair of separate circles. Phil Barry, founder of British startup Blokur, was a professional artist making electronic music as Mr Fogg before setting up his own independent label.
Barry went on to lead the team of consultants working on Thom Yorke’s 2014 project to release his Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes as a BitTorrent bundle, before founding blockchain startup Ujo Music, overseeing its work on Imogen Heap’s ‘Tiny Human’ project.
A parting of the ways with Ujo followed, with Barry founding Blokur to continue that work. He stresses the company’s desire to be as down-to-earth as possible.
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Demystifying blockchain: ‘Call it Sex Chocolate or something!’
Blockchain technology has evangelists and sceptics galore in and around the music industry. Is it really the answer to the music business’ infamous problems with transparency and efficiency?
A conference panel convened by Music Ally at the by:Larm festival in Oslo today was the latest chance to answer that question – or at least to argue about why it can’t be answered yet.
The panel included producer and entrepreneur Kevin Bacon; NMP director of online services Hans Peter Roth; Blokur founder Phil Barry; and Fuga CEO Pieter van Rijn. Music Ally’s Steve Mayall moderated.