The Music Industry’s Next Shake Up
By: Kenny Rowe
Tags: Music, Blockchain, Bitcoin

Last week singer-songwriter Imogen Heap held a small press conference at the Sonos Studio in London. During the event she debuted her new song Tiny Human, and shared a vision for the future. A future where artists and music lovers transact with each other directly. A future where digital rights lie in the hands of creators not corporations. You could call it fair trade music or a direct music distribution marketplace, but whatever you call it it’s the start of something new.

Imagine a world where you can pay for music and know exactly who will be paid for that music up front — down to each musician, publisher, and recording artist. A world where you can create music and you get to decide what the price will be and under what conditions it can be used. A world where content is permanent and unchanging and everything can be found in one place. At first this all sounds complicated and in-feasible, and it would have been just a few years ago, but new technology is making all this possible with just a few lines of code.

You don’t need to sell your privacy for “free” services. You don’t need to worry about servers going offline. You don’t even have to worry about credit cards if you don’t want to. And music is just the beginning. This could be the beginning of a technology that could change our lives as much as the internet did.

There are exciting times ahead, stay tuned.

How to Download Imogen Heap’s New Song “Tiny Human”

1. Buy some bitcoin

Why do you need bitcoin? It’s kinda what makes all this new tech possible. If you’re new to crypto currencies I suggest you do a little reading (but it’s not required)

I like to use an app called Circle so I’m going to show you how to get some bitcoin using this simple app, but if you already have bitcoin skip to the next step.

Download the Circle app for Android or iOS

Add a debit card or bank account or debit card (click settings>Cards and Banks)

Buy some bitcoin maybe $5 worth

2. Create an account at Imogen’s download site

Go to: https://alpha.ujomusic.com/#/imogen_heap/tiny_human/tiny_human

Click download

Click New Wallet

Give it a password (you’ll need this later)

Click download again

You’ll see something a little different now.

See that funny looking address? (Your address will be different)

Address: 0xaadd74f71770fbef7325860bce13cff05e3ad1c9

This is the place we need to put some money in order to download the song

2. Fund the address

Ok so this next part might be a little tricky. You need to convert your bitcoin to a currency called Ether. To do this head over to a site called shapeshift.io (it works best to do this on a desktop computer)

This site allow us to fund our address so we can buy the song.

Click to select the coin ETH (you’ll get a big warning, but it’s nothing to worry about)

There are a few things we need to do now.

Enter the amount of ETH we need. You can find this number back on the download page in my case it’s 1.030577252542372881ETH (you may want to round up)

Enter the address from the download page. In my case it’s 0xaadd74f71770fbef7325860bce13cff05e3ad1c9

After you click Start, open the circle app on your phone and click on QR code and scan the code on your screen.

Follow the steps to transfer some of the bitcoin you purchased with circle to shapeshift.

Shapeshift will then convert your bitcoin to ether, and the deposit the ether for you.

The conversion my take a few minutes to complete, but it shouldn’t take too long. After the conversion has completed head back to the download page.

3. Purchase the song

From the download page click the box “Click to Purchase”

Enter your password (hit enter)

The song should download on it’s own

You have now purchased music directly from the artists who produced it. They were paid instantly and fairly. Welcome to the future.

This is all still a big experiment so if you have any problems with your download you can contact ujo music directly here.