Yesterday, Canadian firms GuildOne and Beatdapp declared a three-year collaboration to manage digital rights for streaming music services utilizing blockchain in India and Japan. Beatdapp has developed a blockchain solution to trace music streams in real-time and records the number of times a song was played. It validates, verifies, and authenticates streamed media. It is basically an audit service for the music industry to ensure that there are no discrepancies with royalty payments.

Goldman Sachs predicts streaming music royalties will hit $34 billion by 2034. Nevertheless, Beatdapp discovered that 15% streaming play count reports are inaccurate, which amounts to millions in lost revenue.

GuildOne, which until now has operated with oil and gas majors, will contribute its enterprise blockchain expertise to determine royalties and execute payments. Oil and gas royalties are quite complicated due to various stakeholders in the downstream and upstream sectors. In 2018, the company completed its first proof of concept royalty smart contract settlement utilizing blockchain on its Energy Block Exchange (EBX) platform.

Now, the company intends to utilize this blockchain royalty know-how for payments in the music industry. Beatdapp will build the blockchain transaction log for streaming music, which will be adopted by GuildOne to calculate royalties due to labels, artists, and producers and execute payments. GuildOne is applying its ConTracks solution, a smart contract engine that operates on R3’s enterprise blockchain Corda.

“To partner with a leading expert in the payment space to ensure our verified usage reports yield faster, more accurate payouts to artists and labels is a great outcome for everyone involved. After a year of hard work behind the scenes, we’re delighted that day has come!” said Andrew Batey, Co-CEO of Beatdapp in a statement.

“We are particularly looking forward to applying our ConTracks smart contract engine to the burgeoning music royalty market,” said Barry Kreiser, co-founder and CTO of GuildOne in a statement.

GuildOne has an abundant presence in the oil and gas sector and supported the OOC Oil & Gas Blockchain Consortium to test blockchain-based authorization for expenditure (AFE) balloting. Meantime, last year, South Korea’s CJ Group unveiled a digital copyrights system for music. Algorand is producing a copyright management platform for the Italian Society of Authors and Editors (SIAE). And HTC and Alibaba are funded in Bitmark, a blockchain-based digital property rights firm.