What is a Music Community Member Organization?

A Music Community Member Organization (MCMO) is:

• Recognized organization, association, coalition or institution;
• Relevant to music;
• With clear and straightforward membership criteria for its members; and
• Aligned with DotMusic's Mission sharing the common community interest of distributing and promoting legal music

How does the Music Community benefit through MCMOs?

The MCMO phase is a priority-based launch phase for Community members belonging to Music Community Member Organizations (MCMOs). Registrants must comply with naming conditions only allowing them to legitimately register their own name while preventing illegitimate or bad faith registrations.

This phase provides better protection against abuse or impersonation, offers established community members a cost-effective alternative to the Sunrise phase (or an Early Access Program - http://domainnamewire.com/2013/11/14/some-new-tlds-will-run-early-access-programs-for-the-landrush-phase), and helps spur Industry adoption.

Given DotMusic’s naming policies, Community members that do not have famous music names may register their names in the subsequent phases without the fear of famous artists registering their names. Furthermore, to ensure fair allocation and competition, Community members that do not belong to MCMOs can currently join many MCMOs for free if they want to secure their names during the MCMO phase. As such, social benefits will significantly exceed social costs.

This process provides increased relevancy for .MUSIC names while preventing cybersquatting of famous music brand names that could also create user confusion. Search engines, such as Google, place significant weight on relevancy (See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35769?vid=1-635758022600006174-3551973370), trust (See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html) and high quality content (See http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html) and http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html). The objective for .MUSIC is that through increased trust, relevancy and higher quality content. DotMusic Content and Use policy does not allow parking pages, which is regarded as low quality content by Internet users and search engines. Also according to DotMusic's Content and Use policy, any .MUSIC domain's content and usage must relate to the subject-matter of music to ensure that Internet users expectations that .MUSIC sites are related to music are met.

To increase trust and protect .MUSIC registrants from bad actors, DotMusic will also use two-factor authentication. Registrants will be sorted in the Premium Channels according to their delineation type and may access and use the Premium Channels after they complete a 2-Step validation. This process provides an additional layer of security to the Music Community beyond their Premium Channel password to better protect their .MUSIC member account. With 2-Step verification, if a bad actor hacks through a registrant's password layer, they will still need a phone to get into the .MUSIC registrant's account. Two-factor authentication is a standard security process that billions of Internet users use. It us used by popular digital companies such as Google, See https://www.google.com/landing/2step/index.html#tab=how-it-protects), Apple (See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204152), Godaddy (See https://www.godaddy.com/help/enabling-two-step-authentication-for-your-godaddy-account-7502), Facebook (See https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/introducing-login-approvals/10150172618258920), Microsoft (See http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/two-step-verification-faq), Twitter (See https://blog.twitter.com/2013/getting-started-with-login-verification) and others.

 

What are some of the benefits of joining as a MCMO member?

The value proposition and benefits for MCMOs include:

• Music Community Member Organizations (MCMOs) can resell .MUSIC domains to their members
• Offering a scarce, complementary domain to members;
• Becoming an accredited mCMO domain reseller for free;
• At cost domain prices;
• Opportunity to generate revenue through a complementary product that enjoys a high yearly renewal rate of 75%;
• Enhancing brand and leadership position by offering an additional benefit to members;
• Eligible Music Offices, Music Coalitions/Associations & Governmental Ministries of Culture & the Arts can become administrators of highly visible geographic domains such as City.music and Country.music, which will be used to promote and export music linguistic and cultural diversity internationally
• Be eligible to participate in the .MUSIC multi-stakeholder governance board

Registration Eligibility is restricted to members belonging to the Community as defined in the Application ("The Community is a strictly delineated and organized community of individuals, organizations and business, a “logical alliance of communities of a similar nature ("COMMUNITY")," that relate to music," See Application, 20A)

According to DotMusic's Application:

DotMusic has incorporated enhanced safeguards, such as...MCMO domain allocation…a new methodology of assigning domain names to the rightful owners. (Application Answer to Question 20a)

The MCMO criteria are consistent with ICANN Applicant Guidebook’s criteria for Community Establishment. Community members can register a .music domain through a .music-accredited MCMO if the MCMO meets the Accreditation criteria:

MCMO Accreditation Criteria:

1. Clear delineation: The Community organization must have clear and straightforward membership and the requisite awareness and recognition from those members.
2. Organized: The Community organization must administer the community members and have membership rules (e.g. Terms of Service or Membership Code of Conduct).
3. Community organization must relate to music in a non-tangential or non-peripheral manner.
4. Membership aligns with the Nexus of the Community and the String, which is explicitly relevant to music. Any tangential or implicit associations with the Nexus of the Community and the String will not be regarded as delineated memberships since they would be considered unclear, dispersed or unbound. Such unclear, dispersed or unbound tangential relationships would not constitute a qualifying membership of an accredited MCMO and would be ineligible for registration.
5. Community organization activities are aligned with the .MUSIC Mission and Purpose.
6. Membership is of non-negligible size.
7. Membership geographic dispersion is either international or national (i.e. organizations with merely local memberships do not qualify).
8. Forward-looking longevity: Membership pursuits are of a lasting, non-transient nature (i.e. will continue to exist in the future).
9. Membership activities must be music-related e.g. involved in the legal production and/or the distribution and/or the promotion of music (i.e. of the same nature).
10. The Community organization’s functions must legally comply with the string’s regulated sector in relation to copyright and clearly abide to the sector’s clearly, delineated systems to ensure fair compensation and proper allocation of royalties to Community rights holders.

To apply to become an MCMO please fill the MCMO Application Form and email the complete application to DotMusic at community (@) music.us.