The word “music” means something different for each person.

For many people, music is what’s on the radio, and for some, music is therapy, a drug, and life itself. When someone asks what music means to me, I’m tempted to say that it’s everything, but that’s not particularly enlightening to someone who is trying to understand what I mean when I say “music”. It’s a miracle that anything gets done in this world when something so experientially deep and categorically broad can be expressed in a single word, without a second thought.

When talking about something complex, it’s important to be clear about what we mean when we say certain words. This is especially true of the “B” word that’s been making its rounds in the music world as of late. It’s important that our followers understand what we mean by the “B” word since it’s so vital to our mission. Just like music, for us the blockchain is everything — let us explain.

What Instruments Can the Blockchain Play?

The blockchain is a young technology that encompasses a lot of bright ideas, and so far, only a tiny set of those ideas has been explored by folks in the music industry. And that’s not a dig at anyone; this space is dizzying and especially so if you’re a tourist in Crypto Land. We’re concerned because the hype is bigger than Prince:

The blockchain is supposed to save finance, energy, and central government before it’s had its first cup of Earl Grey, fix the online gaming industry and global supply chain by lunch time, and dismantle the patriarchy by dinner. Sometime between then and bedtime, the blockchain has made patching up the music industry its creative outlet.

So far, people are still thinking much too small for such big talk. We’ve been quietly observing a lot of the movement happening at the intersection of music and technology, and by comparison, Crypto Land moves at light speed. People on the sidelines still seem to be enamored by the novelty of time-stamping events and namespace squatting on the blockchain. While these are well-understood uses of the technology, they’re not the only things blockchains are capable of and fall tragically short of the grand vision that some of us share about the blockchain’s place in music.

When talking about the blockchain, it’s better to keep things simple so no one gets lost in the maze of crypto-economic jargon. We are mostly talking about a special type of container that holds information about the world in a very particular way. In the case of music, rights metadata (i.e. information about who owns which copyrights and is used to pay royalties) is out of sync globally, making it a prime candidate for capture on the blockchain. How to go about capturing it is a matter of debate, but what’s interesting is that there is a common set of underlying problems to solve in order to have an authoritative rights catalog on any type of shared database — let alone a blockchain.

Who Owns the Music?

First and foremost, there’s the question of ownership. Determining who should own, maintain, and ensure the ongoing integrity of a music catalog is crucial to its existence and long-term value to the music industry. Any solution that excludes either artists or their agents as stakeholders is doomed to fail. At a high level, we’re already observing the negative effects of abstracting rights away from their creators and collecting them into large conglomerates. So the question that remains is one of beneficial governance — what would a joint cataloging effort look like? Thinking back on the Global Repertoire Database debacle, we clearly witnessed what happens when disagreements go unresolved at this juncture. With such a divergent group of stakeholders, the thought of organizing the global effort inside of a traditional legal entity quickly becomes mind-numbingly tedious.

Fortunately, there exists a growing body of knowledge in the blockchain space focused on exploring more inclusive models of ownership and decision-making in an online setting. While early attempts in this field have been near-catastrophic, the more prescient among us might view mass social experiments (such as the ill-fated DAO) as the first crash in many flight-attempts to be made by the Crypto-Wright brothers. Blockchainers are testing a new type of vehicle for humans to organize themselves.

More interesting than the crash is what’s been shown as perfectly within the realm of the possible:

We can meaningfully raise funds for a creative project very quickly while avoiding the pitfalls of traditional financing (e.g. over-concentration of influence from a handful of stakeholders) People are willing and open to the idea of organizing and exploring new forms of democratic process and accountability on the blockchain We can encourage good behavior in digital environments using tokens that have real-world value The Ethereum ecosystem is nimble enough to address systemic risks using a hybrid of technological and social consensus.

Each plane crash makes the next flight safer. We’re a long way from the 747, but we’ve demonstrated that human flight is possible.

Where Should Artistic Identity Live?

Once there is consensus on ownership, then there’s the tall task of figuring out how to identify the individuals who will be performing master and song registrations. Without a system for uniquely identifying creators and their creative works on a unified platform, royalty payments will forever remain broken. There are many facets to the constitution of a digital identity, some of which are difficult to verify in an online environment. But before one can even begin designing the formal verification process of something that may look like an ‘artist identity’, there’s the question of where identity should even live.

We could certainly proceed much like the web has over the past three decades and have users register all of their personal information in an Ujo-controlled database, but this misses a key part of what the blockchain enables. In principle, we want to move away from company-controlled user data. If we believe creators need to have greater control over their rights, then it follows that their greatest asset — artistic identity — should remain self-owned rather than in the hands of a third party . Innovative projects such as uPort have made it their mission to return control of digital identity back to the individual and make it truly portable. This could form the basis for tying master and song registrations back to real-world owners.

Once we’ve managed to get the identity and governance pieces in place, there’s still the challenge of creating the right incentives that will empower users to ensure the growth and maintenance of their music catalog. Success will only come in the form of active participation from the catalog owners, all of whom must be free to make decisions they believe will benefit themselves and the larger ecosystem. Easier said than done, and more easily done with digital tokens on the Ethereum blockchain. These three elements: self-sovereign identity, distributed governance, and token incentivization, form the holy trinity of blockchain systems. Any blockchain solution targeted at the royalty payment space that is missing one of these elements will get stuck on the tarmac and fail to take off.

These three elements: self-sovereign identity, distributed governance, and token incentivization, form the holy trinity of blockchain systems.

What Does ‘Ujo’ Mean?

We believe the machinery required to make the music industry move for creative rights is the blockchain, and it’s important that we have a shared understanding of what that means and what it’s going to take to get there. It’s our hope that by combining a handful of these next generation technologies, we can bring about a new type of collective in the music industry — one that enables creators to retain more control of their rights, to receive fair and transparent compensation for their creations, to have leverage in the marketplace, and reduces the costs of licensing content and paying royalties.

We know that music can’t be reduced to the notes on a page or the shape of a waveform, and if it can be captured in words at all, surely its nature is both transient and eternal, something that lives and inhales inspiration, exhaling a breath of the sublime. Similarly, the word “blockchain” — much more than a word or a technology — represents an ideal, one that embodies openness and will serve as a catalyst for global movements everywhere. Ujo, which means ‘container’ in Esperanto, wishes to position itself as a collaborative container for music rights. For that to happen, we need everyone to start deepening what the “B” word means to them.

This article was written by Gabe Tumlos, who does strategic things on the Ujo team. If you’d like to discuss some of the ideas in this blog post, feel free to reach out on Twitter or here.