Open Music Initiative
The Open Music Initiative is a nonprofit initiative of Berklee College of Music, founded by Berklee's Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship (BerkleeICE), in partnership with the MIT Media Lab and a number of other leading media industry and academic institutions. Open Music's goal is to identify gaps in the music ecosystem that, when corrected, would result in additional compensation flowing to music creators and contributors.
The Open Music Initiative exists to create an open-source protocol for the uniform identification of music rights holders and creators, in order to assure proper compensation for all creators, performers, and rights holders of music.
Founded in June 2016, the Open Music Initiative consists of over 200 members, including the three major labels Sony, Universal, and Warner, as well as YouTube, Spotify, Pandora, Netflix, Alibaba, Sonos, Sirius, Viacom, and many more.
Since its founding, Open Music has convened five plenary meetings, segmented into working groups that generated over 50 business use cases, held over 3,000 hours of conference calls, and designed and released an Open Music Application Programming Interface (API), and hosted international public gatherings showcasing the implementation of the API. This API will allow interoperability between industry platforms such as music catalogs at labels and publishers, and the databases of streaming services or music licensing and supervision companies.
For more information, including highlights from the Open Music Summer Labs, featuring Berklee students, and updates from recent public events, see the Open Music website.