Popular music streaming service Spotify AB announced today that it has acquired Brooklyn-based blockchain startup Mediachain Labs.

Mediachain Labs builds open-source distributed ledger solutions, also called blockchains, to provide attestation and attribution for creative works. In 2016, the company launched an open-source image attribution engine, the Mediachain Attribution Engine, designed to make searching for images easier while providing the original creator credit.

This same process can be applied to music, said the Mediachain Labs team, who have been working on a similar process for that industry.

In a blog post outlining the modern state of musical attribution, Mediachain Labs co-founder Jess Walden said licensing, attribution and metadata “is trapped in proprietary databases, spreadsheets, email inboxes and long-form contracts maintained by separate organizations.” This, Walden said, leads to constant industry errors in properly providing residuals and royalties for song rights.

This is a problem that has bitten Spotify’s music service in the past. In March 2016, the music company settled a massive lawsuit for $30 million with the National Music Publishers’ Association for unpaid royalties.

Spotify’s digital warehouse of music currently exceeds 30 million songs and adds approximately 20,000 per day. The service streams more than 1 billion songs a day to a growing base of close to 100 million users. And as of September 2016, Spotify had paid out more than $5 billion in royalties to rights holders.

Employees of Mediachain Labs will be joining Spotify’s team in New York to help further the company’s goals of “a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners.” Also, according to Mediachain, the company will release its Mediachain protocol, source code and documentation to the Open Source Software community.

This problem within the music industry—poor, incomplete or inaccessible records of rights holders—is a long-term problem that has only become worse with the rise of music streaming and other technologies. Mediachain Labs and Spotify are following in the footsteps of previous evangelists who have sought to bring blockchain to the industry.

“Blockchain is completely enabling us to rethink the basic, core structure of how monetary distribution works in the industry,” Imogen Heap, a musician and artist, told City A.M. “It can be used to build a united platform and create an ecosystem, but most importantly builds innovation under the standards that make sense for artists.”

Heap announced her blockchain project, Mycelia for Music, in 2015 amid a rise in appreciation for how the technology could be used to help clean up the mess of royalty contracts, rights holders’ claims and artist attribution.

Image: Pixabay