Far Further

Type:	Privately held
Founded:	2008
Headquarters:	179 Belle Forest Circle Suite 104, Nashville, TN 37221
Country:	USA
Website:	www.farfurther.com
LinkedIn:	Far Further
Key People
Loren Balman, CEO John Styll, President & COO

Far Further was established by music professionals in 2008 with the primary objective to serve as the registry operator of the .music community gTLD. They applied for the TLD as a community priority applicant via the company, dot Music LLC. There is a second community applicant, DotMusic, and 6 non-community, generic applicants.

The company aims to unite the global music industry and to provide a secure domain space for the industry, to promote music, protect intellectual property rights and to help advance music education through the .music TLD.

Far Further partnered with Neustar to provide back-end registry solutions for the .music domain space.

In February 2012, the company won the support of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). According to Far Further president John Styll, they gained the RIAA support after a strong competition with other parties who responded to the association's RFI process. Styll said, "The RIAA put together a loose coalition of organizations from sectors from around the world and ran a pretty intensive RFI process." Thus, Far Further was able to demonstrate to the RIAA that it has strong intellectual property rights protections and policies. RIAA has been vocal on this issue. The association previously wrote to the United States Department of Commerce (DOC) requesting the implementation of "heightened security measures" for the .music gTLD.

Styll explained that the .music domain name space will be restricted to accredited Global Music Community Members. He emphasized that the company will monitor the contents of their registrants and under the registrant agreement, all entities with .music domain names are strictly prohibited from violating the intellectual property rights of other parties. He pointed out, "We’re retaining the right to conduct searches. If we find evidence of infringing activity we’ll give you the opportunity to correct that, or we can take down the site."

Other Supporters

Apart from the RIAA, Far Further's bid for .music TLD is also supported by the following organizations: Alliance of Artists and Recording Companies (AARC), American Association of Independent Music (A2IM), American Federation of Musicians in the U.S. and Canada (AFM), American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Association of Independent Music (AIM), Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI),, Bureau International Des Societies Gerant Les Droits D’enregistrement et de Reproduction Mecanique (BIEM) * Church Music Publishers Association (CMPA), European Music Council (EMC), Guitar Foundation of America (GFA), Independent Music Companies Association (IMPALA), International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC), International Confederation of Music Publishers (ICMP), International Federation of Musicians (FIM), International Federation of Phonographic Industries (IFPI), International Music Council (IMC), Music Producers' Guild (UK) (MPG), Music Publishers Association of the United States (MPA), Nashville Songwriters Association International (NSAI), National Association for Music Education (NAfME), National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM), National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM)/digitalmusic.org, National Music Council of the United States (NMC), National Music Publishers Association (NMPA), SESAC, Société d’Auteurs Belge – Belgische Auteurs Maatschappij (SABAM) , Songwriters Guild of America (SGA), Sound Exchange, The Recording Academy (The GRAMMY Award Organization).

Management Team

Far Further's management team include:

• Loren Balman, CEO
• John Styll, President & COO
• John Frankenheimer, .music General Counsel
• Ralph Simon, Head of Global Development
• Paul Zamek, SVP Global Marketing
• Keith Thomas, VP of Artist Relations
• J. Beckwith Burr, .music Special Counsel

.music Strategic Advisors

• Alexa Raad, CEO of Architelos
• John Matson, COO of Architelos
• Norbert Grey, CFO of Architelos

Partners

Far Further signed on with Architelos to provide further protections against abusive registration tactics, such as phishing, malware, botnets and spam through Architelos software-as-a-service, NameSentry. The software will also provide the flexibility to help safeguard the creative rights of artists, songwriters, musicians as well as intellectual property rights in general.

Competitors

Other parties applying for the .music TLD include:

• Music.us and MyTLD headed by Constantine Roussos and Tina Dam, the only competitive community application
• Top Level Domain Holdings Ltd. (TLDH) in partnership with LHL TLD Investment Partners of Beverly Hills California (LHL)
• Donuts, the largest new gTLD applicant, with 307 new gTLD applications submitted
• Amazon, one of 76 applications, most of which have been described as "closed TLDs", whereby they would not be open for registration by the wider Internet community
• Famous Four Media
• Google, one of 98 applications submitted by the company
• Radix, a division of Directi

Top-Level Domain