Teosto

Teosto

In an industry-first partnership, Revelator, BMAT and Teosto, have demonstrated a new standard for paying right-holders (songwriters and music publishers) faster by processing near real-time monitoring of BMAT radio performance royalties in conjunction with Teosto’s proprietary data set and using Revelator’s Data Management Platform & Original Works’ smart contract-powered Artist Wallet.

Challenge

Writers are the first to create and the last to get paid. Existing models and methods of royalty processing based on localized data collection of performance data have injected lengthy multi-party processes and payment cycles for rights holders.  Without faster processing of data, the copyright industry cannot advance and thrive in alignment with new industry requirements of scale, speed and transparency. Writers shouldn’t be the last to get paid in the music industry royalty flow.

Using modern technology this process can improve the status quo landscape to speed up and streamline performance royalty collection. We are aiming to change the existing standard by introducing a modern cloud-native and distributed system architecture for processing data and executing payments in near real-time.

Solution

Instant Payments

In 2018, Teosto partnered with Revelator to build a unique application to standardize the Nordic collection societies’ publishing data model called the Polaris Works API. Revelator is now working with the rights society alongside radio monitoring platform BMAT to prove that daily payments from radio performance are possible.

Teosto provided the metadata, splits and user information for 3 songs and 19 rights holders. Revelator queries BMAT for radio plays of those 3 songs several times per day. Whenever new radio plays are reported in Finland, Teosto uses the Original Works Network to transfer the royalty payments to the smart contract that represents the underlying musical work.

The smart contracts automatically and immediately disseminate the payments to the Wallets of the rights holders. There is a wallet for each of the rights holders involved; payments are made in Original Works tokens, which rights holders will be able to convert to the fiat currencies of their choice once the project reaches the production stage.

The result enabled TEOSTO to distribute performance royalty payments within 24 hours to 19 different right-holders Wallets.

“After endless conversations about blockchain and smart contracts, it’s finally time to take advantage of the technology in real use cases, this time with a simple goal: to pay songwriters and publishers faster. In fact, very fast.” - Turo Pekari, Senior Advisor, Innovation and Discovery at Teosto.