Bringing together technology, talent, and our partners to explore solutions to some of the biggest problems faced by aspiring musical artists.

The music industry is on shifting sands. Over the past decade, music streaming has reshaped consumption and democratised access, but not always to the benefit of the artist, who typically earns just 0.0028 per stream. Now, with the advent of AI across the entire music ecosystem, the mechanisms to determine who gets paid, and how much, have struggled to keep pace. Rights data remains fragmented, revenue share disputes go unresolved, and artists increasingly spend their time on non-creative tasks trying to make ends meet. Over the past months, BBC Research & Development have been exploring ways to combat these problems and to enable musicians to enter the industry in a way that feels visible, fair, and equitable.

Discovery and access matter just as much as infrastructure, however, and the BBC has a long history of backing new talent. BBC Introducing is the king and queen maker of the grassroots music scene, helping to launch careers that have shaped British music, with over 300,000 artists, 1 million original tracks, and 20 regional weekly radio shows. But the challenge now isnt just finding great artists, its making sure they have the tools, knowledge, and networks to build a career. Thats why BBC R&Ds FWD team has been working with technology start-ups, music education institutions, and BBC Introducing to design what the future on-ramp to the music industry should look like. The music industry needs a tool that puts power back into the hands of the artist, and as BBC Introducing turns 20 next year, we feel the time is now.

PHARE is our latest experiment into how we can do just that. PHARE is grounded in transparency – designed to connect creatives to their industry in an enduring way. Weve built PHARE around three key pillars:

• Dream It – To eliminate the barriers between a creative idea and its execution by providing the community, spaces, and knowledge needed to grow.

• Own It – To give creators absolute ownership and insight over their intellectual property and digital likeness through automated registration, protection, and provenance.

• Earn It – To create a frictionless, transparent marketplace where licensing music is as simple as drag-and-drop and getting paid is instant.

This work doesnt exist in isolation; it builds on multiple BBC R&D interventions in the creative industries:

Content credentials

• Broadcasters, media organisations, and brands need practical ways to understand both the credibility and integrity of a piece of art. Creators, on the other hand, need a definitive way to assert ownership of their work and to ensure proper attribution and payment. This is particularly important as AI-generated content becomes ever more convincing. Our development of C2PA – the open standard Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity – gives us a framework for combating disinformation and establishing trust and confidence with artists in the control of their IP. In effect, C2PA acts as a digital passport for art, locking provenance into the work in a way that is tamper evident.

Orbit

• BBC Orbit – our award-winning discovery tool built in partnership with BBC Introducing – allows both artists and audiences to discover music in a way that feels purposeful, organic, and is free from algorithms. The way that music is consumed today doesnt feel intentional, and we wanted to create a world where the music is at the heart of the experience, not how many followers you have or whether youre trending. Every song in Orbit is measured along eight different features before being mapped semantically and relationally to one another. This creates a connected web of the tracks for BBC radio teams and, through PHARE, brands, to find the next big hit.

Distributed ledger technologies

• Central to our work is an exploration of distributed ledger technology (DLT) – the same family of technologies that underpins blockchain – as infrastructure for a more transparent and equitable creative economy. Unlike traditional centralised databases controlled by a single platform or rights organisation, DLT offers a shared, tamper-resistant record across systems of who made what, when, and on what terms. For PHARE, it could mean a single source of truth for rights ownership, an auditable trail of the use of their content, and automated, near-instant payments, without the need to trust any single intermediary.

Over the coming months, BBC FWD will explore several technology pilots and experiments to expand our existing work and to build on PHARE. Our aim is to bring together technology, talent, and partners to find solutions to some of the biggest problems faced by aspiring musicians.

To kick this off, were taking part in Audiotools Lets Build worldwide hackathon, using the open-source NEXUS SDK. Our team members will take part as challenge definers, creators, and judges to build music tools for the PHARE platform, and we will host an in-person event in London. This gives us a live testing ground for questions weve been asking. What does it take to embed rights infrastructure into a creative workflow without interrupting it? What do musicians need from a platform like PHARE at the point of creation, not just after the fact?

We want PHARE to be the place where the next generation of musicians do business, protecting their creative work from the outset, and where the industry becomes transparent before it becomes a barrier. The connections we build through this hackathon, and through our work with educational institutions, are a step towards that.

If youre a creator, technologist, or industry partner who believes the system should work better for the people who make the content that drives it, the PHARE team would like to hear from you.

Sound PHARE?