Today, November 7th, marks a turning point in Ujo’s history. Due to ongoing maintenance costs, the time has come for us to bid farewell to our beloved Alpha project. Instead of spending time maintaining the prototype, which fulfilled its purpose, we are knuckling down to build an open platform for all artists.



We had grand ideas about how we can use blockchain technology to alleviate artists’ pain points. We were not the only ones who started seeing the writing on the wall. The Ujo team joined with Grammy award winning artist, Imogen Heap’s initial Mycelia experiment as both wanted a more fair and open music industry. Imogen posted Tiny Human to her website along with all relevant metadata for the song to see what new music services could do with it. In collaboration with Heap, we were able to showcase the power of the blockchain in getting Tiny Human up for sale on the newly launched Ethereum blockchain. Ujo and Imogen Heap then made history in enabling the first song ever to demonstrate the transparency and real world benefits of smart contracts for the music industry with automated royalty payments to all stakeholders. (thanks to Simon de la Rouviere and Mike Goldin). The contract code is available here .



It started off a bit rough as we were limited by a number of factors: from time constraints to the capabilities of smart contracts in those early stages. But after a few brainstorming sessions on how to attach several licensing policies, a user interface was designed, and we had a functioning prototype to show the different stakeholders involved in Imogen’s production! (Thanks to Vlad Todirut and John McDowall).

