Celebrated Electronic Duo Booka Shade Partners with Surround

Surround, the blockchain-powered ecosystem for the music business, is announcing a collaboration with Booka Shade. The Berlin-based electronic power duo are joining Surround as  artist early adopters and will be part of the platform’s beta test. 

“Artists with strong production knowledge are very important for our vision of Surround,” explains Stefan Schulz, CEO and co-founder of Surround. “Working together from the point of creation will allow our technology to provide the highest value to the market, synchronizing the world’s data for the benefits of artists and copyright owners in the safest way possible“.

Booka Shade is uniquely qualified to support and guide Surround. Popular artists with a widespread following and impressive festival history, the duo have also been instrumental in founding several labels and imprints, including Get Physical Music, a landmark label in the electronic music scene. The duo has remained staunchly independent, releasing music on their own Blaufield music.

Using Booka Shade’s metadata from the group’s latest album release, Dear Future Self, the Surround team investigated how the album’s tracks were moving through the music industry’s complex and opaque pipelines. As fully independent artists who own both the recording and composition side of their tracks, Booka Shade has both sides of their music to manage. That increases the challenge of managing metadata and monitoring income significantly.

“All stakeholders need and want a better way to handle all this data and ensure it’s correct,” notes Surround SVP, Operations Johannes Cordes, whose extensive A&R and artist management experience will inform Surround’s collaboration with Booka Shade. “Our goal is to make everyone’s lives easier by setting up a more efficient system based on immutable, transparent technology.” 

“The music business has gone through many changes. The use and availability of music has changed completely. Regional music markets have become a global music market. More and more music is produced and flooded into the sales channels. This flood of music and data leads to an overload of the systems, which are no longer able to ingest and process them correctly,” Booka Shade’s Arno Kammermeier reflects. “As artists and creatives, we lose overview. With Surround, we see the chance to regain more control over our music and its value development. We look forward to working on this promising platform and helping to develop it further.”

“We are thrilled that we have won over one of the most important and influential teams of artists and producers in electronic music to help guide our future vision of a fairer, better, and more organized music industry,” Cordes says. “Their enthusiasm, experience, and advice will help us develop an even better product for musicians and the music business.”

About Surround

Bitfury Surround was founded in January 2019 and tackles the challenges of artists and other stakeholders in the music industry. The Surround platform is a fully interoperable digital ecosystem for the exchange and monetization of copyrights. Surround is an asset management and commerce platform for music IP that will offer a copyright control center and a music technology marketplace. It will improve economic opportunities for the entire music industry by providing multiple blockchain-based management services, including the secure transfer of copyright assets. Surround’s goal is to significantly increase the value of copyrights and strengthen trust, transparency and efficiency.  www.surround.com

About Booka Shade

Berlin-based duo Booka Shade (www.bookashade.com), aka Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier, have carved out a reputation as one of the most celebrated electronic acts to come out of Europe in the past two decades. With their beginnings in Frankfurt and their sights originally on synth-pop, the duo quickly gained a strong following within electronic music. Twenty years, dozens of EP’s and six albums later, Booka Shade have become more than a household name, they have become synonymous with the spirit which drives electronic music and have set a precedent to which electronic music is still held to today.

Booka Shade have earned huge recognition with their innovative live shows, even being named one of Resident Advisor's Top 5 live acts in the world in 2010. They have opened for legendary acts such as Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk, whilst headlining stages at the likes of Coachella, Glastonbury, Rock Werchter, and Red Rocks just to name a few.