A brief history of music x crypto

We’re approaching almost a decade of experiments in music and crypto — from Imogen Heap’s first single deployed on Ethereum in 2015 to the NFT hype of 2021 and the newest wave of artist memecoins. 

We’ve seen many attempts at bringing music rights onchain, bold dreams of remonetizing the music industry in favor of artists, and several million dollars in nft sales.

In many ways, however, we’re still at square one. I think it's fair to say we haven't meaningfully changed the way the music industry works yet. Despite that, this is still the only place where new models are being tried and likely the only place where real change is possible.

In this post, we’re looking back at all the megatrends and pivotal moments in crypto and music over the years. This list isn’t exhaustive — it's designed to capture the broad arc of trends so if we missed anything please feel free to drop it in the comments below.

Imogen Heap releases first blockchain-enabled single -  Imogen Heap used Ethereum to facilitate payments to songwriters, producers and collaborators for her single Tiny Human. Made possible by Ujo — the earliest company to explore music and crypto — this was the first historical use of smart contracts splitting payments between rights holders. Fun fact: it was launched in May 2015 before the Ethereum mainnet officially went live in July. [Read more]

The Open Music Initiative - Led by the Berklee College of Music and MIT Media Lab, this was an early attempt to create open source standards for music and rights holders. More than 190 companies were involved including all three major labels, Spotify and YouTube. [Read more]

Selling music via Bitcoin - DJ Rare Scrilla was among the first to issue cryptoart and cryptomusic on Bitcoin's "Counterparty" layer. [Read more]

Mediachain acquired by Spotify - Spotify acquired blockchain-based music data startup Mediachain in April 2017 with the goal of using Ethereum to help attribute artist payments and explore other use cases. Mediachain was co-founded by Jesse Walden (now at Variant). [Read more]

The first album on Ethereum - Producer (and Oscillator co-founder) RAC released “EGO,” the first full album on Ethereum and IPFS in collaboration with Ujo. [Read more]

Audius launches - The first attempt at decentralising a streaming platform goes live. [Read more]

Jaak pilots a music rights product - British startup Jaak partnered with publishers Warner/Chappell and BMG to collect music rights data and detect conflicts. Jaak later shut down in 2021 with a good retrospective of why things didn’t work out and the difficulty of working with music rights. [Read more]

UJO Portal - Ujo launches the first self-serve music-based NFT platform allowing artists to create ERC-721 tokens. [Read more]

Consensys partners with US performing rights organization - Ethereum’s incubator Consensys wins a bid to build The Mechanical Licensing Collective — an attempt to digitize and modernize music rights data, ensuring musicians and publishers get paid correctly. [Read more]

The start of the DAO Era - The first music DAOs began appearing including DAORecords, NoiseDAO, Friends With Benefits and PleasrDAO.

Most expensive cassette ever - RAC launches $TAPE, the most expensive cassette ever sold using a bonding curve to facilitate sales. [Read more]

Early social tokens - Producers RAC, BT, Illmind and later Portugal The Man all experimented with social tokens — the earliest form of coins linked directly to the artist and traded on open markets. [Read more]

3LAU record $11.6 million sale - Electronic producer 3LAU drops an audio-visual album NFT "Ultraviolet", fetching a record $11.6 million at auction. The music x art era continued with Grimes selling $6 million of NFTs on Nifty Gateway and native crypto artists like DEAFBEEF producing generative music. [Read more]

Wu Tang Clan sells for $4 million - PleasrDAO purchases the legendary Wu Tang Clan album “One e Upon a Time in Shaolin” from the US Department of Justice for $4 million. [Read more]

Into the metaverse - Decentraland launched a metaverse music festival with digital performances from Björk, Ozzy Osbourne and Dillon Francis. The Sandbox attracted major collaborations with Snoop Dogg and Warner Music.

First music video over $10k - Rapper Latasha minted one of the first ever music videos on Zora, selling for a record 2.5 ETH at the time.

The music NFT era - Catalog and Sound capture the momentum with combined ~$10 million in tokenized music sales for independent artists.

Songcamp CHAOS packs - Music collective Songcamp drops a collection of 5,000 CHAOS Packs with 77 collaborators. It generates ~$500k in primary sales. [Read more]

Streaming royalties onchain - 3LAU launches Royal — a platform for tokenising streaming royalties and sharing with collectors. The first wave of artists include Nas, Chainsmokers, Diplo and Verite. Later, Swedish company Anotherblock tokenises streaming royalties for songs by Rihanna and The Weeknd. [Read more]

Major label NFTs - Warner Music launches several NFT collections including “Stickmen Toys” and “Probably a Label.” Universal Music licenses four Bored Ape Yacht Club characters to create a virtual band “Kingship.” [Read more]

Ticketmaster pilots a token-gating feature - In collaboration with Avenged Sevenfold, Ticketmaster launched a token-gated ticketing flow, allowing the band's tokenized fan-club members to access tickets before anyone else. [Read more]

Layer 2s change the game - Ethereum layer 2s reach scale and usability, leading to an explosion of accessible music and social activity onchain. We switch from hyper-scarce expensive NFTs to thousands of low-cost mints, driven by platforms like Zora and distribution through Web3 social protocols like Lens and Farcaster.

Iggy Azalea launches $MOTHER - A new wave of artist tokens launched on Solana, led by Iggy Azalea's $MOTHER which briefly reached a $200 million market cap. [Read more]

Members of the Oscillator team have been involved in music and crypto projects from the very beginning — from the first Imogen Heap single on Ethereum in 2015 to the NFT wave of recent years.

The common theme through all of it is trying to deepen the artist-fan relationship, and building our personal identity through music.

However, there's also one common headache throughout it all: music copyright — an impossible web of outdated legal issues that acts as a ceiling for every project building in the space.

That's why we're now so excited about exploring the social graph around music. We've reached a tipping point where music fans can own their social graphs and hop seamlessly between new consumer apps onchain.

Music and its connective data will inevitably be a huge part of this culture, and it's unencumbered by music copyright laws.

The opportunity for building music products within this design space is where we are most excited and focusing all of our energy.

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