Almost one year ago, Ujo Music released the ‘Tiny Human’ prototype in an effort to explore what was possible at the intersection of music and blockchain technology. In our demo, we sought to demonstrate what direct fan-to-artist payments might look like in a digital setting. At the time, we were so excited to share the awesomeness of the blockchain that we took an admittedly simplified approach to solving the payments problem in the music industry. This blank slate approach, looking back, ended up holding us back from making meaningful progress towards solving some of the deeper issues surrounding royalties in music. We decided to take a few steps back and re-evaluate where we actually were, what it is we set out to do, and where we could most effectively play in the music sphere.
We spent a large chunk of the last year doing a proper dive into the machinations of music in the Western world, learning more about the ins-and-outs of copyright monitoring and enforcement, music metadata, distribution, promotion and marketing, and artist development. We cast as wide of a net as possible, taking care to observe and understand the perspectives of each stakeholder in the music industry, from PRO to publisher to label, all the way down to artists. From our conversations, it seems that the industry heavyweights would really like someone to clean up the global metadata problem. More importantly, we heard many recurring themes when speaking with artists: the situation is dire, and it’s becoming harder and harder to be heard in an increasingly crowded marketplace.
We want to solve all of your problems. We really do. But we are but a few bright-eyed technologists with a special hammer, looking for the right nail.
If we, for a second, forget about all of the mysticism surrounding the blockchain and simply look at what we have at our fingertips, we can take a second to appreciate that what we have is a new type of database that happens to be pretty good at doing certain things. The Ethereum blockchain is great at keeping track of information and replicating that data across a network of computers, which is interesting to the folks with metadata problems who have trouble figuring out who owns what and who to pay. We’re collaborating with some of these groups to figure out if we can’t pick up where the Global Repertoire Database left off and effectively become plumbers for the entire music industry. We’re aware this is the unsexiest thing a technology company could do in the music industry, but someone needs to do it, right?
More interestingly, the Ethereum blockchain is great for building open communities with guaranteed transparency and personal ownership. This gets even more interesting when combined with decentralized file systems like IPFS. Think of this as something that’s similar to the cloud, but instead of your information being owned and controlled by Apple or Google, it’s collectively supported by all participants in the system. Anything you upload to this cloud can be tied directly to a unique identity you own and control, which gives you the power to share as much or as little as you want, on your own terms. Understanding this, we caught a glimpse of how transformative this concept would be for artistic identity in the digital world.
We began asking ourselves, “What does artistic identity look like on the web today, and how might it work on the web of tomorrow?” What if we gave artists a truly portable identity and full control of their digital content, and made receiving payments from fans as simple as receiving an e-mail? And what if that identity wasn’t restricted to a single service like SoundCloud, YouTube, or any one of the many online music services on the internet?” By investigating these questions, one begins to get a sense of what a shared infrastructure might look like that’s both fit for purpose in today’s digital music age and sits right in the blockchain’s sweet spot.
This is what we’re exploring at Ujo, and we’re excited to share what we’ve been working on soon. For all those wondering: yup, we’re still here =)
