How verified music provenance works on Soneium.

Primitive

Composition and master are two separate rights, anchored separately.

Every released track is two copyrights, not one. The composition (the song, identified by ISWC) lives in the publishing ecosystem with writers, publishers, and PROs like JASRAC. The master (the specific recording, identified by ISRC) lives in the recording ecosystem with the label, the artist royalty, and the producer points.

Conflating them is the single most common signal of an out-of-touch product. We render them side by side, always — the rights stack panel never collapses the two.

On-chain mechanics: On-chain: a single EAS attestation per recording (`MUSIC_RECORDING_v1` schema) anchors the public fields and the IPFS hash of the key-gated metadata. Public and key-gated fields are partitioned at the schema level per the music-rights JSON schema.

Primitive

Derivative-attribution edges are cryptographically signed and queryable both directions.

When one work derives from another — a sample, a cover, a sync placement into a film, an opt-in for AI training — the deriver signs an attestation describing the edge: the source, the use, the license, the consideration. The attestation is anchored on Soneium via EAS and indexed off-chain.

Click any recording, see every downstream work that references it. Click an external sample, see the original Sony Music recording it samples — both directions, one query.

On-chain mechanics: On-chain: 4 EAS attestation schemas (`sample_of`, `cover_of`, `sync_into`, `ai_training_set_of`), one per active edge type. The indexer normalizes for bidirectional queries via `downstreamUses(workId)` and `upstreamSources(workId)` — no separate passive-form schemas needed.

Primitive

Rights transfer between sub-labels, between labels, between organizations — same primitive.

When a master economic interest moves between sub-labels — say, Epic Records Japan reassigns to Legacy Recordings inside SMEJ — that is one tx. When a catalog moves across an organizational boundary — Sony Music to an indie label, or back the other way — that is the same tx pattern, only the parties differ.

Each transfer carries effective date, instrument reference, and the on-chain tx hash anchoring the counterparty signatures. Ownership history is a scrollable timeline, every hop preserved.

Critically: the demo distinguishes label-of-record (stable) from master-economic-interest (mobile). The Bruce Springsteen / Sony 2021 deal stayed Columbia label-of-record while the underlying economic entitlement moved. Our schema captures that distinction explicitly.

On-chain mechanics: On-chain: `RIGHTS_TRANSFER_v1` EAS schema. The `right_type` field distinguishes master_economic_interest, catalog_administration, publishing_administration, neighboring_rights, sync_clearance, and mechanical_administration. The indexer renders the full transfer log per right per recording.