Abstract

The vast majority of music is unreleased. While 100,000 songs are uploaded to streaming services every day, they represent only a fraction of what’s made every day. This paradox exists in nearly every creative media format. Contrary to popular belief, unreleased material gets a ton of engagement. Beyond listens, likes, and shares, songs go through revisions, receive comments, adopt new collaborators, and get paired with visuals. Currently, these are spread across an array of disparate solutions that are difficult to manage and leave creators vulnerable to stolen IP. Baton bring all this activity under one roof. It's an ecosystem for work-in-progress material that helps creatives discover and get discovered, while protecting creative IP, and ensuring everyone is properly credited and compensated for their work. The initial platform allows users to see exactly who’s listening to, downloading, and sharing their material. Next we’re launching communities, where creators with common interests can collaborate and get discovered. The platform doesn’t just showcase material - it generates engagement for pre-release ideas while keeping a record of all contributions, which can be used to inform payouts once material is released. At full scale, we’ll be a comprehensive mixed-media collaboration and rights management ecosystem.

Research

Baton is the culmination of a lifetime of music making. After growing up in the NYC jazz scene, I opened a music studio in 2019 with the intention of creating a collaborative space and recording resource for NYC's incredible community of musicians. As more collaborators came to the studio, I had the privilege of hearing tons of unreleased ideas that were incredible, but were unfortunately just collecting dust on hard drives. At the same time, I became increasingly aware of how difficult it is for creatives to make a living from their work. Despite insane talent, I saw how many of these musicians struggled to get by. This prompted an extended research period, where I spent months talking to artists, producers, managers, labels, and publishing companies trying to understand why this disconnect existed – massive libraries of amazing creative material that wasn’t being shared. Ultimately, I uncovered two fundamental problems: 1) Finding a home for unreleased ideas is prohibitively hard. 2) Creatives and their management are vulnerable to stolen IP and inaccurate ownership metadata, which results in billions of dollars of lost revenue.

Technical Details