Supporting Musicians: Introducing Digital, Collectible, Patronage Badges.

Simon de la Rouviere
Ujo Music
Published in
4 min readOct 20, 2018

As fans, we’ve all bought the band shirt, the collector’s edition vinyl & the tour badge for our backpacks. Besides streaming, buying the music & attending gigs, this is how we connect with our favourite musicians. It’s not merely a token of appreciation, but also a way to connect with other fans.

It’s time we move more of this meaningful experience into the 21st century: supercharging ways to support artists, ways to collect memorabilia and ways to connect to other fans.

Collecting Experiences

12 years ago, as a teenager living in a small town in South Africa, I discovered the beautiful noise of Beck. From his grungey, greasy blues to colourful, eclectic pop, his music resonated with me, and I’ve been avid fan ever since. He is my favourite musician.

This year, in April, whilst in the US, I got the opportunity to see him live for the first time. I left with a dream fulfilled, a happy heart and 2 pieces of merchandise: a dope shirt & hat. It will not only remind me of the evening I finally got to see him play live, but also all the memories his music imprinted on me in the past 12 years. It’s the first time I managed to get a hold of merch (reliably) and pay Beck beyond buying his music.

Isn’t it absurd that in this era, the general way to support a musician is to 1) buy their music, 2) go to a gig (IF they perform), and 3) buy any merch they are selling? For small, independent musicians, streaming rarely pays nearly enough.

Other musicians are using newer models such as crowdfunding & subscription payments. It’s time we made it easier and created new music economies.

Collectible, Patronage Badges

Today, after having this in beta for a while on the Ujo Portal, we’re happy to announce that Collectible Patronage Badges are officially live. We first experimented with collectibles over a year ago with our artist-in-residence: RAC. We’re now bringing it to all artists.

Check out my collection: https://ujomusic.com/portal/collections/2

This features allows fans to buy a $5 dollar, collectible badge from any musician on Ujo using Ether as a cryptocurrency. As with our releases, 100% of this payment goes straight to the artist without any intermediary taking a cut: facilitated through the blockchain.

This badge is stored AND transferable on the Ethereum blockchain, forever a proof that you were a fan.

Head on over to the discover page and find some great music to support! https://ujomusic.com/portal/discover.

Why the blockchain?

You might wonder why a blockchain is necessary for digital, collectible badges?

Using the blockchain allows us to super-power digital collectibles for musicians in new ways:

  1. For fans, this is a proof of your support that will never disappear. Your record of supporting the artist will always be inscribed on the blockchain. No algorithm or company can take this away: not even Ujo.
  2. For artists, this opens up new avenues for fans to support you. You will also be able to do unique value-added services in the future: like sending discounted tickets to badge holders OR chat rooms where you can only enter with a badge.
  3. For developers, it allows you to create new, extensible experiences between the fan and the artist. Have an idea for a social network using the badges? It uses the EIP721 non-fungible token standard, so it is easy to implement and create, new exciting experiences. Do you have Ethereum development skills? Start playing here: https://github.com/UjoTeam/contracts-badges.

Rare Badges?

The first collectibles we are releasing are infinite. Any amount of fans can buy as many Patronage Badges as they want to. This makes the collectibles not rare or unique. It’s simply a way to get an additional souvenir for supporting the artist. We started with the simplest badges possible to explore how we can support musicians.

There’s a lot of ways to build this new economy. We are exploring different avenues for additional badges and collectibles into the future, such as:

  1. allowing musicians to create once-off collections of unique, rare badges with unique artwork and auction them off [think Kanye selling digital Yeezys].
  2. allowing fans to create badges and send them to them to artist as a thank you [a digital rose to your favourite k-pop band].
  3. allowing the releases themselves to become collectibles, having scarce releases.

We are busy building the new music economies for the fans and artists.

If you have ideas as musician or fan for what kind of badges or collectibles you’d like to see, please get in contact with us!

Looking forward to seeing your collections. 🎉

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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.