Proportionate content compensation

by Olaf Weicker

In the content realm, proportional compensation models are customary, especially for music. Parts of the revenue go to the provider, e.g. Spotify, the label and last but not least the band / singer, the composer, the song writer etc. However, for the different forms of exploitation like live concerts, radio, recording medium, download, streaming, different licensing and compensation models apply. Also, things are becoming particularly complex when it comes to managing and billing licenses based on countries or user groups.

Thus, managing licenses and billing license fees is becoming elaborate and complex very fast. An individual creative will hardly be able to tackle this task. This is the main reason why collecting societies and organisations like Gema, Spotify and music labels handle the management and billing of license fees for artists.

Since many processes in this realm are still performed manually and hardly any standards with regard to licenses and billing exist, the management overhead is correspondingly high, and one of several consequences of this is that originators only receive 5-15% of sales revenues.

At this juncture, the Content Blockchain Project wants to bring about new alternatives for all creatives by means of the ISCC and blockchain technology. We are working on creating simple, standardized license models for commercial exploitation, akin to Creative Commons licenses of the open content realm. By using Smart Contracts, we are reducing the administrative overhead to a minimum.