Brooklyn-based Mediachain Labs has been acquired by music powerhouse Spotify. Blockchain fueled Mediachain isthe driving force behind the Mediachain project, a world-class Blockchain research agenda and open source protocol to better manage data that is critical to the health of the music industry. The Mediachain team will join Spotify’s New York City offices and help further Spotify’s journey towards a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners.
As Blockchain News reported last year, Union Square Ventures & Andreessen Horowitz seeded Mediachain Labs for $1.5 Million.
Mediachain staffers blogged:
Early in the life of Mediachain, we were inspired by two things: the implications of Bitcoin for a new generation of completely open and decentralized data networks, and the magic of the technologies behind Shazam and Google Image Search to let us discover the creator of an image or song at the click of a button.
The problem we wanted to solve is one creators and their audiences face every single day: billions of images, songs, videos, and written works are easily shared online, yet they quickly lose connection to their creator and history or context as they are reposted.
We had a simple idea: What if the information about all media ever created was completely open, and you could instantly know everything about whatever you were viewing, watching, reading, or listening to — who made it, what it was, where it originated — regardless of how you came across it?
That’s what we’re building with Mediachain: a completely open, universal media library.
Mediachain connects media to information, through the content itself. It combines a decentralized media library with content identification technology to enable collaborative registration, identification, and tracking of creative works online. In turn, developers can automate attribution, preserve history, provide creators and organizations with rich analytics about how their content is being used, and even create a channel for exchanging value directly through content, no matter where it is.
Imagine being able to connect with the artist of a viral GIF you see in your feed, learn the history or origin of any image, or automatically reward a musician whenever you press play. Developers can build this and much more given the tools to discover and reuse information about our universal culture.
Mediachain approaches the problem millions of creators and users encounter daily in a novel way.
