Blockchain Revolution

CHAPTER 9
FREEING CULTURE ON THE BLOCKCHAIN:
MUSIC TO OUR EARS
t wasn’t your typical yearling’s birthday party. The celebration took place at the
Round House an hour outside London, in a massive barn complete with sound-
reactive LED tree, a bouncy castle, and a buffet fit for Henry VIII. The crowd was
eclectic: a “contact” juggler, two dozen toddlers, their parents, neighbors, musicians,
and a handful of blockchain developers. There was Vinay Gupta, a Scottish-Indian
engineer best known for inventing the hexayurt, a small disaster relief shelter. Gupta
is now explainer-in-chief when it comes to communicating blockchain technology to
the masses. There was also Paul Pacifico, CEO of the Featured Artists Coalition.
After a career in banking, Pacifico is now fighting for the rights of musicians. And, of
course, there was our host, Imogen Heap, an accomplished composer and musician,
voted “inspirational artist of the year” by readers of Music Week,
1
and the mother of
one-year-old Scout.
“I want to know that the stuff I’m making could be worth something to Scout
someday,” Heap told us. She was expressing her deep concerns about the music
industry. “It’s so fragmented; there’s so little leadership, and there’s so much
negativity around the business side of it,” she said. “Everything is topsy-turvy. It’s all
upside down. The artists are at the end of the food chain. It just doesn’t make sense.
Music is everywhere, all the time. It’s on our phones, it’s in our taxis, it’s everywhere.
But the artists are getting less and less.”
2
And therein lies the rub. The Internet is a marvelous muse, both a medium of
creativity and a channel for free speech. There’s no shortage of ideas for what talented
artists, designers, and coders—and their many fans—can do with one another on the
World Wide Web. Nor is there a dearth of ways to make money from all this creative
collaboration. Creative industries such as music publishing and recording have been
tapping new revenue streams like digital downloads and streaming audio. The
problem is that, with each new intermediary, the artists get a smaller cut and have
little say in the matter. David Byrne of Talking Heads fame summed up the situation

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in an op-ed piece: “It seems to me that the whole model is unsustainable as a means of
supporting creative work of any kind. Not just music. The inevitable result would
seem to be that the Internet will suck the creative content out of the whole world until
nothing is left.”
3
This chapter looks at ways that blockchain technologies are putting artists at the
center of the model so they can not only “have their cake,” that is, exercise their
freedom of expression, but also “eat it, too,” maximizing the value of their moral and
material interests in their intellectual property. In other words, to restore their rights.
No more big, greedy intermediary, no big government censors. Here, we survey the
cultural landscape—art, journalism, and education—where basic human rights and
livelihoods hang in the balance.