Unblocking Music’s Blockchain: Berklee’s Panos Panay On CNBC

Berklee College of Music's Panos Panay recently explained to a CNBC panel how “blockchain,” the system behind Bitcoin, has vast revenue potential in the world of music.“The vision behind it is to create an open protocol that dramatically simplifies the way that rights owners are identified across the supply chain of the music industry,” Panay said.

He noted that a global hit from the likes of Taylor Swift has 500,000 different ways of creating revenue.

Panay, a former agent for Pat Metheny and Chick Corea, among others, and the founder of Sonicbids, was essential force behind the foundation of the Open Music Initiative.

"We are a nonprofit initiative of leading academic institutions, music and media industry organizations, creators, technologists, entrepreneurs and policy experts who love and value music,” the OPMI states. “We are creating an open-source protocol for the uniform identification of music rights holders and creators. We are not building a database or a specific product. The outcome of OMI will be API specifications to enable industry platform interoperability.

According to Wikipedia, a blockchain is “a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that is used to record transactions across many computers so that the record cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all subsequent blocks and the collusion of the network.”