One of the biggest problems in the music industry today is that there is no coherent and robust documentation of ownership rights. Information about ownership which is stored in Metadata can be lost during communication, collaboration and distribution. Faulty or missing information leads to unclear ownership, making rights management and licensing a liability.
We propose a novel protocol GitMusic for standardardized ownership tracking, blockchain based automated rights/royalty management and immutable distributed file storage. Our Solution offers a fundamentally new approach to rights management by creating autonomous (music) files that incorporate and manage their own ownership rights. This solution is based on a standardized open source protocol for trusted collaboration through version control. The protocol allows every session of changes made to a musical piece to be signed in an immutable ledger of all changes. By signing each new version gives the artist the ownership of the changes. On start of every music project a genesis is configured which is a smart contract that carries the Terms and Conditions for collaboration, licensing and distribution of the musical piece. Once released on the web the project will act as an immutable entity which can manages its own rights and is open for collaboration.