What opportunities are uniquely available to dApps on the Ethereum network that other platforms and applications can’t scale or build for?

A lot of people talk about blockchains as if they are magic wands that are going to fix problems without humans, which is the farthest thing from the truth. Blockchains are a tool, a very advanced and innovative tool, but a tool nonetheless. Human problems will still exist but we can do our best to mitigate them and add in checks to the software to make sure that data is as accurate as possible.

Blockchains add in a payment layer to the internet. Currently, we can’t pay $0.002 / stream because the credit card fees alone would be more than 10x that. We can walk by a street musician and throw our loose change into their hat. While that change adds up, it’s not something that has translated to the digital world. Micro-payments are going to be massive for music. Additionally, the concept of a shared database is not something that anyone in the music industry has enabled. We saw an attempt in 2012 with the Global Repertoire Database but we haven’t seen any effort to continue that since it was disbanded. Sharing rights information is critical to getting the proper artists paid, however in the current ecosystem, this could not be farther from the truth. Establishing micro-payments and a global database are a solid first step in expanding the innovative avenues for music monetization.

How can a musician who knows very little about Ethereum and blockchain get involved with Ujo?

At this time it’s still a bit of a challenge for non-technical people to get involved in blockchain. We think our Creators Portal is pretty easy but it can definitely be improved. We’re constantly iterating to make it a more user-friendly experience. The goal is that, in the future, people won’t even know that they’re using blockchains.

How are you educating the music and developer communities about Ujo?

We’ve been hard at work building out the Ujo platform and haven’t engaged with the community as much as we would like. We’re working to fix that but it really starts with letting artists know they have a choice. A choice to go down the traditional route or to explore new roads and innovate in the industry without sacrificing their careers. With developers, we’re working continuously to build out our APIs and partner in hackathons to make sure that the developer community is not ignored.