JAAK Uses Ethereum and Swarm to Disrupt the Media and Entertainment Industry

Each company gets $120,000 and Techstars receives 6 percent equity. Mentors include Interscope's Jeremy Erlich, Ticketmaster's David Marcus and Jody Mulkey, Spotify's Sumit Varshney, Pandora's Dagan Josephson and Amazon's Noah Shanok. The program draws support from Sony Music, Warner Music Group, Harmonix Music Systems, Sonos Music Systems, Silva Artist Management, Q Prime Artist Management, Young Guru's Era of the Engineer and Bill Silva Entertainment, providing capital, business development and ongoing mentorship to selected startups.

The announcement follows JAAK's unveiling this month of META, an open metadata network built on Ethereum and the Swarm decentralized storage system. The company presented META at the European Ethereum Development Conference. META connects organizations across the music and media industry, including performing rights organizations, record labels, broadcast companies, publishers and digital content platforms. The network allows these entities to capture, store and verify commercial metadata, then communicate that data industry-wide. JAAK aims to build a real-time metadata network and establish a standardized framework for low-cost licensing.

JAAK is working with Viacom and PRS for Music to build a prototype blockchain-based rights management system. The JAAK protocol operates as an operating system on the blockchain for managing and commercializing media and metadata. It stores media assets and data on peer-to-peer networks and creates smart contracts that function as agents to handle access control, process payments and track analytics. These contracts can deliver content to users and be expanded with new functionality as needed.

JAAK participated in Ernst & Young's startup innovation program, the EY Startup Challenge, last year. Alongside the Techstars program, JAAK is establishing the Guardian Initiative, a consortium designed to test and explore how the company's technology can benefit the music and media industries.