Whether we stream it through our smartphones or buy tracks from our laptops, technology has made music more accessible than ever before. For consumers, this is good news. But for the music industry, it’s a different story. In 2015, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) estimates music consumption increased 3.7 per cent and streaming grew a whopping 82 per cent. However, revenues grew by a measly 0.6 per cent. Income from sales and the streaming of recorded music, including the share that can be passed on to artist, actually dipped 0.9 per cent. But technology, as much as it’s been a thorn in the industry’s side, might yet provide a solution. Several key artists and musicians have turned towards blockchain – usually the mainstay of discussions about cryptocurrencies and fintech – as the innovation that could breathe new life into an industry struggling to stay on top of piracy, low revenues and intellectual property minefields. Blockchain first gained notoriety in 2008 as the technology that underpins bitcoin. It operates as a shared ledger, which continuously records transactions or information. Its database structure, where there is a timestamp on each entry and information linking it to previous blocks, makes it not only transparent but exceptionally difficult to tamper with. Although bitcoin has had all the glory, blockchain’s advocates have labelled it “revolutionary” and a “paradigm change”. Banks and public services are already experimenting with it. On the other hand, its critics would say it is merely a souped-up version of existing database ideas. One of blockchain’s most vocal bell-ringers is the Grammy Award-winning UK singer, songwriter and producer Imogen Heap. “Blockchain is completely enabling us to rethink the basic, core structure of how monetary distribution works in the industry,” Heap told City A.M. “It can be used to build a united platform and create an ecosystem, but most importantly builds innovation under the standards that make sense for artists.” The research would seem to back up Heap’s point. In a report this week released by the Blockchain for Creative Industries cluster at Middlesex University and the Featured Artists’ Coalition (FAC), researchers found four areas where using blockchain could be a genuine asset to the music industry. Alongside aiding “fast, frictionless royalty payments”, blockchain can also help to create a networked database for music copyright information, enhance “transparency through the value chain” and aid access to alternative sources of capital. For Heap, using blockchain and blockchain-inspired contracts are undoubtedly linked to creating fair value for the exchange between artists and listeners. By cutting out the middle men, there is a sense of getting back to the more intimate direct exchange between artist and listener. But it is also intrinsically tied up with democratising the creative process. It can offer her listeners a deeper insight into how she actually creates music, and can be the vehicle through which the people who work on her tracks get the credit they deserve too. Last October, Heap released her song Tiny Human attached to a smart contract

In the decade and a half since Napster, it’s got harder for musicians to make a living, at least from recorded music. Falling CD sales, illegal downloads, the low payments from legal music streaming platforms, and a shift towards buying single tracks rather than whole albums all play their part. Recently, a number of music industry projects have turned to a particular technology as a possible solution to these problems. These include Mycelia, launched by singer, songwriter and producer Imogen Heap, andDot Blockchain Music, launched by PledgeMusic founder Benji Rogers. Then there’s Ujo Music, Blokur, Aurovine, Resonate, Peertracks, Stemand Bittunes, which already claims users in 70 countries. What links these projects is that they all are based on blockchain. Blockchain is the software that underpins bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Comprised of blocks of data cryptographically chained together in chronological order, it has two key features. It is immutable: data cannot be modified. And it is distributed rather than centralised: many exact copies are maintained independently of each other. Blockchain technology has been touted as the answer to problems facing industries as diverse as banking, the diamond trade, online gambling and fashion – even how we govern society. How might it help musicians? Owning it The first problem facing musicians comes down to the fact that no comprehensive database of music copyright ownership exists. There are several databases, but none features every track in existence, and when a track appears in more than one database the details don’t always match up. The blockchain, as Vinay Gupta put it in a recent talk, is both database and network. If music copyright information were stored on the blockchain, via a cryptographic digital fingerprint (like a barcode), then up-to-date information could be accessible to all users, rather than being held by particular gatekeepers. Getting paid The second problem is payments. Listeners can access tracks immediately with a click, yet according to a Rethink Music report it can take years for royalties to reach those responsible for making the music. Smart contracts, implemented on the blockchain via software, could split royalties in agreed proportions as soon as a track is downloaded or streamed. Such micropayments might not be feasible with current systems, but systems built around using cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin could facilitate payments in fractions of pennies. Shining light into black boxes Third, the mechanism by which royalties are calculated and paid is often opaque. Some revenue ends up in a “black box” beyond the reach of the artists and songwriters to whom it rightly belongs. In a culture of confidentiality and non-disclosure agreements, artists (or their managers) cannot properly audit their payments if they are not certain how much they are due. Recording music is expensive, and musicians have to get paid. Blockchain could help. Nejron Photo/Shutterstock.com Funding the future The final issue is cash, required upfront to help musicians create new music. It’s often said that artists no longer need record labels, but funds are required to compete commercially – and that

The signs that Imogen Heap was going to be a game changer came at an early age. As has been the case with many of our brightest musicians, Imogen did not get along well with her music teacher at school but found herself in the small cupboard which had an Atari and some music software on it, 25 years ago! She read the manual and so began her work with music and computers. She attended the prestigious BRIT School of performing arts after that to do her A-levels. Here she learned about mixing and engineering, recording real audio. She met her manager there at the age 0f 18 and even before she left school had a record deal. As is normal, Heap has had her ups and downs with labels… Fed up with the battles, Heap went independent at the age of 25 when she wrote and self produced her album Speak for Yourself. A vocoded acapella song, Hide and Seek, from this album gained its fame when featured in the popular teen drama, The O.C. (which broke quite a few artists), and even more so when it was heavily sampled in the number one hit song, Whatcha Say, by Jason Derulo. The O.C. was Imogen’s first real breakthrough moment, and also the first time thousands of people heard her music and found themselves asking, ‘how did she do that? Imogen’s next album was followed up by the Grammy winning Ellipse, which she video blogged the whole process (including the building of her home studio) and he rmost recent album Sparks, saw her doing a project for every song. Taking her to work with a Chinese City for Xizi She Knows, developing her music gloves for Me The Machine and making a running app with Run-Time. Videos and making of documentaries were made for each song. Here’s a link to the sampler for a taster of each song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poMt0o78HO0 Today, Imogen is focused on her Mycelia incentive, of which she reveals all below. We sat down with the sound master herself to find out more about this plan to save the music industry from itself by turning it not so much on its head, but on its feet. ARTICLE BODY TEXT: In a nutshell, Mycelia (http://www.imogenheap.com/mycelia/) has become a think and do tank, for the purpose of connecting the dots between artists, services and fans to create a sustainable music industry ecosystem. This involves overseeing the building and protecting of a verified database for the music community creatives, their work, and their collaborators. We want to see an open database that describes the whole music industry, so that everyone involved can be recognized and rewarded. To enable the artists and their teams to shape how their music is used from one day to the next. Currently a song is uploaded and then it is as if it just falls off a cliff. Very little data about what it gets up to and so leaves the artist in a much poorer

Award-winning recording artist Imogen Heap is on a mission to decentralise the music industry. Could blockchain technology hold the key? Yessi Bello Perez reports. Known for her musical prowess and as one half of British electronic duo Frou Frou, Grammy-winning artist Imogen Heap is also a technologist and one who’s striving for the decentralisation and democratisation of the music industry. Heap developed an interest in technology at an early age. She explains that, when she was 12, her parents split up and she went to boarding school. “I spent a lot of my time there hiding in a cupboard that had a computer in it – that was my first introduction to music and programming,” she said. “It was the first time I could see something on a screen and I could type something in on a keyboard and out the notes would come. It was just an incredible opportunity for me to finally hear back all the music that was in my head.” As the years went on, she used her school recording studio and learned about electronic music, recording techniques, amplification and so on. All the time sat in the school cupboard paid off, as Heap secured a record deal at the age of 17. Now, aged 38, she has one Frou Frou album and four solo albums under her belt and has an extensive knowledge of the workings of the music industry. One thing she has learned is that there is a great lack of transparency in the industry, a problem she feels technology is best suited to remedying. Recently, the artist has been exploring the potential of blockchain technology, which is already creating waves in financial services and is now showing great promise in other areas, such as the arts. Blockchain “Blockchain is the catalyst for change in the industry. It’s a new piece of technology, in the same way MP3 was. It’s a step in the right direction,” said Heap. Blockchains could enable artists to release their tracks themselves and gain greater control over the terms of the release and the profits received. They could use smart contracts to dictate who gets what share of the money generated and, on the consumer side, they could even implement a tiered pricing structure depending on who is purchasing the track and for what purpose. It could operate a similar premise to photo sharing platforms such as Flickr – those using an artist’s music for non-commercial purposes could get hold of it for free, while those wanting to use it on, say, an advert, would have to pay a fixed amount. Heap said it would give artists greater control over pricing, something which they have little to no say on currently. She thinks it would be great for artists to be able to action flash sales on their tracks, or issue them for free to those under the age of 16, for example. Let’s say there’s a natural disaster in Asia, the artist could decide to syphon all

Demos Quarterly

British singer and songwriter Imogen Heap is building what she calls a “fair trade” music industry that aims to sidestep middlemen like iTunes and Spotify and give musicians more ownership over the money and data produced by their work. Heap’s latest song, “Tiny Human,” a ballad to her newborn daughter, debuted last year on a site called Ujo Music where users can buy the song, as well as the track’s key, tempo, and stems, using a cryptocurrency called Ether. The money goes directly to the producers, writers, and engineers involved in the song’s production. “When someone buys a piece of music or plays a piece of music, ultimately in the future there will be no need for a middle, centralized service. The fan will be immediately paying the artist,” Heap told Quartz on Thursday (Feb. 18) at Design Indaba, an architecture and design conference in Cape Town. The singer’s experiment with “Tiny Human” is the precursor to an entire music eco-system she’s building called “Mycelia,” named after a thread of underground fungus that grows for miles. Aside from enabling faster, direct payments for artists, Heap wants to create a free platform where musicians have control over the data created by their songs as they circulate among fans and other musicians, including the song’s credits, terms of usage dictated by the artist, where the song is played and when, and any transactions. This information is tracked using blockchain technology, a method of recording digital transactions first used for Bitcoin. “There’s a whole world behind each song…there’s a lot of data there and a lot of wasted data that’s not being harnessed to give back to the artist,” Heap says, adding that this data can provide valuable feedback for artists. “It’s so, so important to be able to know where your fans are, what they are listening to, what is exciting to them about what you are doing.” Heap, the only music artist to win a Grammy for engineering with her creation of “musical gloves” that shape sound as she performs, is no stranger to experimentation. She joins the likes of Taylor Swift (whose1989 album she helped co-produce) and other artists who have criticized the music industry’s treatment of independent artists and thefew royalties they receive from streaming services. Her response is to try to build an alternative system. The traditional music industry doesn’t have to be cut out of the process, Heap says. She has been speaking with Spotify about the project and says the aim of Mycelia is not to rival streaming services or record labels but to serve as the source of the music. Artists would turn to record labels for things like marketing and promotion. “It’s about trying to take away the power from top down and give power, or at least a steering, to the artist to help shape their own future,” Heap told reporters. Blockchain technology, already in use on other music streaming and download platforms like Bittunes and PeerTracks, has its challenges.It’s not clear who