The other tips are digital (Image: Doug Pearson/Corbis)

SHOWING your appreciation for a piece of music is now as simple as hitting the record button on your smartphone.

An app called Cheers lets you tip any musician in the world using bitcoins. It uses your smartphone to recognise the audio signature of the music you are listening to – it is this that gets your tip to the artist. The app also lets you manually tip any artist you like. Tips can be between 20 cents and $2 worth of bitcoins.

Web-based tipping services let you send small payments across the web, but only if you have signed up for an account. Cheers lets you tip anyone, even if they don’t have an account. The firm plans to use social networks to encourage artists to accept their tips. Tippers can have their money returned if it is not picked up by their designated artist.


Cheers wants to move into other forms of media, allowing people reading online content to tip the writer using bitcoins. “Whether it’s a streamed song that lifted your spirits, someone on Twitter that made you laugh or a blog post that inspired you, we want to enable you to support these creators, reward anyone or anything in seconds,” Cheers says on its website.

The app was presented at the Bitcoin 2014 conference in Amsterdam last week.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Say cheers to music with a bitcoin tip”