The music industry loses $12.5 billion a year as a result of copyright infringement, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. One Atlanta-based startup is working on a groundbreaking solution to prevent this issue that has long plagued the industry and recording artists.
The Labz, a platform built to help independent musicians create and collaborate safely, uses blockchain technology to watermark lyrics, archive projects automatically, and allows artists to track where their music is playing.
“All these people and all these assets are just rolling around,” founder and CEO, Farah Allen said to Hypepotamus. “All these things aren’t tied to people’s identities. They’re not copyrighted, and people don’t get paid.”
The platform—described as the Google Drive for music—allows artists to upload and create tracks with other artists directly through an online portal that verifies the percentage of contribution of each creator.
“The process of collaborating was a lot of the process that I was solving in the corporate world,” said Allen, a former architect-engineer. “I was asking myself, why don’t they have better technology and actual data collectors?”
Allen and her team successfully participated in The Farm Accelerator, a 12-week early-stage startup education startup program based in Atlanta and sponsored by Comcast NBCUniversal.
The startup has garnered 4,000 signups and has raised $50,000 in funding, according to Hypepotamus.
