The dotBlockchain Music Project (dotBC) has announced its first four industry partners, which includes Canadian Music rights organization SOCAN, its wholly owned subsidiary MediaNet, Songtrust, CDBaby and FUGA.

dotBC, a Delaware public benefit corporation, aims to solve the complex data, rights, ownership and payment issues that currently plague the music industry. According to the official release, the recently announced partners will contribute vital technical and financial resources to the project, which will allow dotBC to accelerate its product development efforts.

"In putting that first foot down, these pioneering companies are helping us to build and deploy the real-world architecture needed to create a fair, equitable and efficient way for the music industry to work together in the digital rights world," said Benji Rogers, co-founder and project lead. "We could not be more excited to have the teams from these amazing companies involved. Industry-wide adoption of the dotBC format is our goal and this feels like a very promising first step."

Following the release of phase one of the open source code into GitHub earlier in the year, the dotBC team began collaborating with these industry partners representing key components of the music business ecosystem.

These companies together will have the potential to bring a catalog of over 65 million sound recordings from independent and major labels linked to the world's repertoire of musical works into the ecosystem globally. With more than 500,000 new recordings added each month, dotBC will be working with the vast majority of the modern music library, ensuring comprehensive coverage of recorded works for the project.

Other key players in the space, including key digital service providers and rights holders have also committed to sponsor the development of dotBC, but have chosen to remain behind the scenes for now. 

"CD Baby is excited to work with dotBlockchain to assist our independent artists and songwriters in managing their music rights and assuring payment. This approach to Blockchain technology could change everything for DIY musicians”, Tracy Maddux, CEO of CD Baby, said.

"The potential of blockchain technologies to revolutionize rights and royalties is well documented.  At FUGA we strive to remain at the frontier of such innovations, so we're delighted to be rolling up our sleeves for this project in cooperation with some of our clients”, Pieter van Rijn, CEO of FUGA, the high-end tech partner for content owners and distributors added.

DotBC is currently onboarding more partners in a similar fashion as well as artists, songwriters and service providers of all shapes and sizes through its queueing site.