Introducing Ujo Portal: Making Musicians More Money.

Simon de la Rouviere
Ujo Music
Published in
6 min readDec 13, 2018

At Ujo, as musicians ourselves and fans of music, we believe the world will be a richer place when we can support the musicians in their craft. For us, it has lead to one overarching goal: making musicians more money. By doing so, musicians will be able to support themselves, bring forth new music to the world, and we, the fans, will be culturally richer for it. We want to liberate music.

With new technologies, we are aiming to do this in the following ways:

  • reducing the cost of how business is currently done.
  • create new economies so fans can support & connect with musicians.

We’ve been working towards this from multiple angles. Since May of 2018, we’ve learned a lot during the beta period of the Ujo Portal, and are now proud to announce the launch of version 1 of our Ujo Portal.

With version 1:

  • Musicians can upload and sell their music for cryptocurrency, receiving 100% of the funds due. We take no cut. You retain control of your rights. Users do not require any cryptocurrency to register.
  • Bands can create a profile for themselves, allowing the funds to be paid for releases to be automatically split and sent between band members.
  • Fans can engage in new economies & support their favorite musicians by tipping them directly, or buying a collectible, non-fungible token indicating their patronage and support for an artist.

As you can see, we are making artists more money by cutting out the middlemen, reducing the cost of payments to such an extent that musicians can get paid AND receive 100% of the funds from their fans. By using blockchain for automatically splitting the funds between musicians we are also taking out the unnecessary administrative costs involved.

We were pioneers in creating the first digital collectibles, and now going full steam ahead in creating a new economy for fans to support and connect with the musician. With Patronage Badges, fans can collect digital badges from their favorite musicians and forever have a record of their support permanently memorialized. These badges are extensible, and we look to creating additional economies on top of it.

The Future

At Ujo, we believe that a rising tide lifts all boats. We will only get where we want to be when we have others join us. There’s a lot we have planned and we hope you can join us. In the future, we will be working on the following components.

On-boarding. Where will the Ujo Portal go from here?

This whole new economy is very new. In order to use Ujo, one needs to utilise new software such as MetaMask or cryptocurrency wallets. Like any pioneering frontier, this can be scary & confusing. We are exploring ways for users to on-board themselves using methods they are more familiar with, whilst still being able to utilise the revolutionary, underlying infrastructure and not compromising on our principles of liberating music.

We’ve already removed the requirement of having Ether to register and upload music.

Crypto-Dollars.

Paying in cryptocurrencies is amazing when a fan from anywhere in the world can pay the musician, directly and have them receive 100% of the funds. However, cryptocurrencies as most know them are notoriously volatile. For musicians that want to make a living, this volatility can be detrimental. Over the past year, many stable coins, however, have arrived that allow fans to pay musicians in dollar-equivalent currencies without having to use the old, legacy payments infrastructure. This means, the musicians don’t have to worry about any conversion or anxiety about keeping a volatile asset.

Imagine being paid 100% of the funds in crypto-dollars? No fees.

New economies.

We have a huge list of experiments we want to run with you all. There’s so many exciting possibilities to create new economies: allowing the fan to connect in new ways & allowing the musicians to support themselves.

We want to experiment with rare badges, new token economies, monetizing discovery and curation, the works. It is going to be very exciting!

Platform.

The longer-term vision of Ujo is much grander. Through an open platform built on blockchain technology (such as Ethereum), owned by the commons, we want to enable 1-click licensing of all media for any use.

This requires legal, technical & standards innovation. Musicians will publish their metadata into a machine-readable, distributed database, consumable by all. From here, anyone can utilise the smart contract attached to the metadata to enter into an automated agreement to buy and use the rights attached to it. A media custodian, as part of the agreement, will disburse the media for its particular usage.

Under the hood, we’ve already started: you don’t see it, but we are producing metadata according to the COALA IP standard and publishing it towards the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). We are using smart contracts for agreements & payments. We have spun up and tested distributed databases such as OrbitDB. We will soon demo an end-2-end, fully legal, smart licensing agreement with OpenLaw. We are busy researching & building next-generation streaming technology that allows transactions at a very, very granular level: allowing fans to listen and pay directly to musicians when they stream music. This will all happen with flexible encryption to ensure that musicians receive what they are due.

In building this economy as a platform, Ujo will build value-added services on top of it. We have already started, and you can already see our first pass at documentation.

This will take time. Technology will mature. But the vision is clear. Eventually, we will have a global record of rights with fully automated, globally compliant smart licensing without intermediaries. When this works, musicians will receive substantially more revenue without any of the complex, unnecessary, administrative burden in between. Fans will be able to participate in these new music economies along with the knowledge, that unlike it is now: 100% of their funds are going straight and directly to the musicians.

Conclusions & New Beginnings

We’ve come quite far, but we are only at the starting line. With the first release of the Ujo Portal, we are making musicians more money. We are reducing the cost of business and creating new economies for fans to connect with musicians. Musicians can sell their music for 100% of the payment due, and fans can collect digital badges of their favorite musicians.

This is only the start as we aim to improve on-boarding into the new ecosystem, building out the platform and building new economies.

We won’t get there by ourselves. We want to talk to you. Are you an artist or a fan, excited about this? We want to help. Please e-mail us at: info@ujomusic.com.

Let’s liberate music, supports the arts and make musicians more money.

Thanks from Simon, Jack, Jesse, Jon, Kyle, Vlad, Natalia, Breana, Sharon, Alex, Nihar, Andre, Bryn, Crystal, Thomas & the rest of ConsenSys who has been helping us along the way.

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Published in Ujo Music

Ujo Music is an Ethereum based, ConsenSys backed music software services company for the modern economic landscape of music.

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