Colu Partners With Revelator For Blockchain-Based IP Management

Revelator builds software that allows artists and record labels to manage, track, and market their music all from one application. The company sees the blockchain as an opportunity to simplify music rights, which remain complicated and difficult to verify, with a new Intellectual Property (IP) management system that will allow artists to register their works on the immutable ledger.

“We are very excited about the potential for Colu’s platform to simplify the management of music rights, starting with those associated with songwriters and their compositions,” said Bruno Guez, founder and CEO of Revelator.

“Colu has made the complex technology of the blockchain accessible for integrations into platforms like ours, and we’re looking forward to exploring all the ways it can improve service to our clients.”
— – Bruno Guez, Revelator Founder and CEO

Since the advent of the internet, content producers have been battling it out to protect their intellectual property. Napster shut down in 2001, following a lawsuit from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). At the same time BitTorent was coming online, a decentralized platform that has became the dominant force in online file sharing. Now there is a public, universal, and unchangeable ledger that could be used to record and verify intellectual property, among other digital assets, something has been one of the prime opportunities many blockchain proponents see for the technology.

“Our mission is to bring transparency to the industry, so that all players—from artists to managers to labels—have easy, quick and shareable access to data,” read a Revelator blog post. “The way we see it, the only way to fix the transparency problem is to give labels and artists a tool that assembles data automatically and makes it easy to view, understand, and share that data.”

Successful songwriter and recording artist, D.A. Wallach, said that the Colu and Revelator partnership could be a big step forward for the music industry. “I am thrilled that such capable entrepreneurs are chipping away at the vexing lack of transparency that makes it so hard for artists today to understand their sources of income. There is great opportunity for this approach to evolve into an industry-wide standard.”

A long time proponent of blockchain technology, Wallach is also an investor in the music streaming service, Spotify, and distributed ledger startup, Ripple Labs.

In January of this year, Colu raised its own investment of $2.5 million. Participants included the Israeli venture firms Aleph and Spark Capital, as well as BoxGroup and Bitcoin Opportunity Corp. The startup has since been quietly working away, and recently launched an open beta platform, which uses the Colored Coins protocol.

“With the new platform, developers with little to no Bitcoin knowledge, can issue and manage digital assets for various uses, from financial industry (shares, bonds, stocks), records (certificates, copyrights, documentation) to ownership (event tickets, vouchers, gift cards).”
— – Colu

The Colored Coins protocol allows attaching metadata to bitcoin transactions, and leverages the blockchain, for issuing and trading digital assets that can represent real world value. The protocol, in various implementations, has attracted praise and attention from a range of industries this year.

The Estonian bank LHV announced that it was working with a software development company to offer a financial platform for payments and asset issuance using Colored Coins technology. Co-founder of venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson, said that the protocol could be where most of the blockchain’s potential lays, while the financial exchange NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange have previously illustrated how it might improve financial trading systems.

Startup investment platform Beamfunder recently announced that it would be using Colored Coins to build a blockchain-based marketplace, to trade equity in early stage companies. The company expressed an opinion that this is a growing opportunity as companies are staying private longer and longer.

“The Colu team has been working closely with various companies to finally leverage blockchain technology in a consumer-friendly way,” said Amos Meiri, Colu CEO and co-founder. “We’re excited to launch this beta more broadly so solutions and services can be used by consumers down the road, starting with an industry as dynamic as music and entertainment. Colu is committed to making blockchain technology easily and safely accessible for everyone.”