Teosto Futures Lab – Rethinking the future of music rights management

Tech and music industry future discussions are heating up this week in Helsinki, with Slush Music and Slush bringing together a huge number of industry professionals for a week of panels, meetings and informal talks. Teosto is actively involved at Slush Music, in a number of panel discussions ranging from nurturing future talent in the creative industries, to future of music metadata and distributed ledger technologies. Teosto Futures Lab is also taking part in the Music Tech Fest Labs Helsinki, an industry testbed event that focuses on music technology, performance and smart contracts in music and other IP rights.

Teosto wants to make using music and licensing music rights easy and efficient, while also enabling new types of music businesses emerge and thrive.  To that end, we launched Teosto Futures Lab, our approach to music rights R&D, last year at Slush Music.

The goal of the Teosto Futures Lab is to probe, test and validate future possibilities for music rights management, especially from technology and business model perspectives, and to take these new ideas to market, either directly at Teosto as internal development activities, or as separate initiatives and projects, partnering with other organizations.

We have a cross-disciplinary team that searches for new business opportunities and validates them using an agile and test-driven development approach, focusing on networked open innovation, customer driven development and design thinking, service design and technology and market research.

It’s one year on from our launch, and we’re starting to see some concrete results from the lab: ranging from Nordic R&D co-operation to Teosto’s own blockchain platform Pigeon, all the way to proof-of-concept projects on emotion data and affective technologies, or bringing music making and digital tools to schools.

Nordic cooperation

Our Nordic R&D initiative Polaris Future Lab focuses on designing a future CMO (collective management organization) core process from the ground up, with current and upcoming technologies.  We’re looking to build a future CMO concept that would be able to adapt to new types of music uses, new types of rights and license terms in a fast and agile manner. In the project, we’re looking at how to cope with trends such as decentralization, automation based on ML and AI technologies, interoperability and real-time analytics.

Focus on the Live Music Market

Teosto’s blockchain platform project Pigeon focuses on the live music market, and looks for ways to make sharing of live music related data more efficient between collecting societies. We have a working prototype of the Pigeon platform done, and we’re currently looking for partners – our plan is to take the platform development to the next phase during the first half of 2018.

See you at Slush Music Helsinki and Music Tech Fest Labs!

This week, Teosto Futures Lab is taking part at several panel discussions at Slush Music, on music metadata, distributed ledger technologies and developing new talent for the creative industries. We’re also partnering with Music Tech Fest Labs Helsinki, an industry testbed for music tech innovation that’s taking place at Maria 01 startup hub during the days before Slush Music. Looking forward to a busy week!

Teosto Futures Lab is Teosto’s approach to R&D – a cross-disciplinary team of research, technology, business development and service design experts that focus on testing, prototyping and validating new concepts and technologies.