To swell its influence, Spotify has acquired Mediachain for an amount nobody knows for now.
Mediachain Labs disclosed the deal via its Medium account that:
Today we are excited to announce that Mediachain Labs, the core team behind the open source Mediachain protocol, has been acquired by Spotify to further the streaming leader’s journey towards a more fair, transparent and rewarding music industry for creators and rights owners.
Over the last three years, we’ve developed open, decentralized data infrastructure, built open-first applications to surface attribution for creators, and even prototyped our own cryptocurrency to reward creators and curators for their contributions to culture. All of these efforts have been driven by the passionate community of creators, developers, blockchain enthusiasts, media organizations and investors who have shared our vision for a more open and programmable world for media metadata.
Spotify is very much a part of this community, a champion of transparency and open data for artists. Our team is steeped in related experience: Arkadiy, our CTO, was the first engineering hire at Hype Machine, the popular music curation aggregator, and before starting Mediachain Labs, Jesse co-founded and ran an artist management firm focused on helping artists like Solange Knowles, Blood Orange and Majical Cloudz independently control their careers.
This experience, as well as the rest of the team’s personal pursuits as creatives, has driven our conviction about the future of media metadata: a shared data layer is key to solving attribution, empowering creators and rights owners, and enabling a more efficient and sustainable model for creativity online. The opportunity to join an organization that shares this vision comes at a crucial time, when the relatively nascent blockchain community has few bridges to mainstream consumers, creators or the platforms they use to interact.
As we sync up with Spotify we will turn Mediachain over to the OSS community — all source code and documentation will remain open source and openly licensed.
Thanks to all who followed, participated and contributed to the project along the way. We are extremely grateful to have been on this journey with you!