Today's digital music industry has placed technological demands on all stakeholders that have proven to be problematic in managing data, rights ownership, licensing and royalty settlement and distribution. The problems are multi-faceted across businesses, technologies, partnerships and data management processes. Furthermore, the next generation of artists, composers and entrepreneurs will face a global market that has user experiences we cannot even contemplate today, and very likely the underlying infrastructures will be based on blockchains and decentralized peer-to-peer networks. Music compositions will increasingly include mashups shared across social media, or remixes experienced within augmented reality or virtual reality environments. Distributed ledger technology and blockchains offer a promising avenue towards solving some of the challenges in the current music rights workflows and supply chains. The Open Music project is spearheaded by MIT and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and is exploring the use of a decentralized music metadata layer that allows for alternative higher- layer services to be developed based on the combination of smart contracts and traditional computing approaches. Music-related rights ownership could be considered as virtual assets that could then allow for new economic incentive models to be contemplated and explored. The overall goal of Open Music is to empower individual artists to reach their creative potential, and to evolve new sustainable business model for artists, entrepreneurs and music business alike.

Speaker Biography:

Thomas Hardjono is currently the CTO of Connection Science and Technical Director of the MIT Trust-Data Consortium, located at MIT in Cambridge, MA. Over the past two decades Thomas he has held various industry technical leadership roles, including Distinguished Engineer at Bay Networks, Principal Scientist at VeriSign PKI, CTO roles at several start-ups, and Director of the MIT Kerberos Consortium. He has been at the forefront of several industry initiatives around identity, trust and cybersecurity. His areas of interest include network and IoT security, trusted computing, decentralized identity, data privacy, and blockchain systems. Thomas has authored several technical papers, patents and books covering cryptography, network security, identity and blockchain security.