The Berklee College of Music’s Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship, or BerkleeICE, has founded an audacious new initiative that’s already received support from the upper echelon of the music industry. Dubbed the Open Music Initiative, this project will aim to establish ‘a global, open sourced platform, providing technology for a shared ledger of music creators and rights owners.’
The project was announced in conjunction with MIT Media Lab and so far the reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with executives for many major music industry players all coming out with support publicly. These include the three major labels (Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group) as well as Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud and even Netflix among a wholly impressive list. Other participants among the 50+ list include Downtown Music Publishing, SiriusXM, Pandora, and several universities.
The founders of OMI intend to incorporate technology within the infrastructure of the archaic music publishing structure to “enable and support the creation of standards for data collection, data reconciliation, and file formats.”
OMI co-founder and founding managing director of BerkleeICE Panos Panoy had this to say.
“We want to use the brainpower, neutrality and convening ability of our collective academic institutions, along with broad industry collaboration, to create a shared digital architecture for the modern music business. We believe an open-sourced platform around creative rights can yield an innovation dividend for creators and rights holders alike.”
OMI will host an inaugural gathering next week on June 22nd in New York City with all participants expected to be present. Following that, a three-week innovation lab will also be held in Boston on July 11-29. BerkleeICE and IDEO will run the lab which will explore use cases and innovationn models.