Israeli firm eMusic seeks $70M to bring blockchain to music distribution and royalty management

eMusic, an Israeli digital music store, is seeking to raise $70 million to build a blockchain-based music distribution and royalty management platform, Reuters reported.

The company aims to leverage Ethereum blockchain to ensure that various stakeholders in the music industry – artists, labels, service providers, and others – receive their fair share of revenue. According to the whitepaper:

“Using existing elements of our catalog delivery infrastructure and business relationships with content providers, we will be enabling a new self-publishing and distribution platform. This platform will power the eMusic Retail Store and evolve to providing seamless distribution through other popular service providers,” eMusic said.

In addition to publishing and distributing music, the platform will also enable artists to manage rights and loyalties. eMusic said that once an uploaded song is played or sold, the revenue is split between the service provider and rights holder.

"Today's supply chain is full of blockers, middlemen and inefficiencies that create barriers for artists' music to get from the studio to fans' headphones. eMusic is going to fix this problem using an all-new blockchain platform that provides a more streamlined, transparent and autonomous structure benefiting all parties," Tamir Koch, CEO of eMusic said.

The company introduced the eMusic Token (EMU) – a proprietary Ethereum-based ERC-20 token that will facilitate all transactions in this blockchain-based ecosystem. The public presale will be conducted in September.