RAIDAR: Building a Music and Blockchain Startup

RAIDAR is a Berklee/MIT music licensing platform designed by Berklee students, for Berklee students to make money from their songs. Berklee students, alumni and faculty can license their songs to visual media students. RAIDAR is powered by Open Music technology, an industry consortium of 300+ members including streaming services and major labels, and is a tool for artist education and career sovereignty.

This course, the first of a two-course series, will use RAIDAR as a pedagogical tool to demonstrate experientially how the stakeholders across the music value chain interact and how intellectual property is distributed and commercialized across this chain. Through a grounding in the concepts related to RAIDAR, spread across many disciplines with the music industry, and then through experiential learning and work in the project itself, students will come away with an understanding of what it takes to build a business in the music industry, and the personal experience of helping to create a real-world startup themselves.

The first semester will focus on the ecosystem in which RAIDAR is built, including the legal, business and technical concepts, and the skills they will need to contribute to the development of RAIDAR as a business.

In the next course, students will work on the RAIDAR team through a practicum, drafting legal documents and intellectual property education tools, conducting business development, designing and implementing marketing and communication strategies, and participating in an interdisciplinary, student-led team that sustains RAIDAR, with guidance by BerkleeICE and Music Business faculty.