In what appears to be an acquire-hire, the team from blockchain startup Mediachain will be joining Spotify in New York City to help the music streamer create “a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners.”
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Details of Spotify’s acquisition of Mediachain Labs were not released, but the blockchain technology company had raised a $1.5 million seed round from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square.
Mediachain Labs has led the Mediachain project, a blockchain research agenda and open source protocol to better manage data that is critical to the music industry. Mediachain says it will turn over the tech it has already built to the open source community as the team moves to Spotify.
Get all the need data to properly licence and pay creators as been a challenge for Spotify and other music streamers. In stead of attempting to create a centralized database, with Mediachain, all data is connected to the identity of the author, offering a channel for attribution, analytics and payment.