The Polaris Nordic alliance of the Danish, Finnish and Norwegian collecting societies Koda, Teosto and TONO announced that they are starting a joint research and development initiative called Polaris Futures Lab. The R&D initiative was launched at the Sonar+D event held in Barcelona, Spain.
With this initiative, the Polaris Nordic alliance aims for a leading role in the future of music rights management by investing in new technologies and services for music authors and publishers as well as music users. The goal of the initiative is to rethink the current CMO (copyright management organisations) processes with a focus on maximising speed, efficiency and transparency of music performance royalties management.
The first phase of the Polaris Futures Lab will focus on identifying key areas for adopting new technologies and developing processes, that would enable a radical renewal of the current CMO model.
“With Polaris Futures Lab, the Nordic societies aim to be forerunners in adapting collective rights management and licensing processes to the digital age, and answer to the needs of the European Commission’s policy objectives on the digital single market and copyright“, says Teosto’s CEO Katri Sipilä.
“The aim of Polaris Futures Lab is to significantly increase the speed of delivering music performance royalties to authors and publishers, and setting a new industry standard for the service level of CMOs”, Sipilä continues.
In Finland, The Polaris Futures Lab concept has been developed by Teosto Futures Lab, Teosto’s innovation platform that was launched in 2016. With an initial focus of 12 months, the Polaris Futures Lab team will begin its work in August 2017 with a concept building phase to identify the development tracks and possible problem areas for the project.
