Mycelia For Music

In July 2015, the British song writer and musician Imogen Heap talked to Forbes about her hopes for a “a fair, true, bright and shining home for music” supported by blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies. And that year she put her ideas into practice.

She released ‘Tiny Human’ with a startup site called Ujo Music, where users could buy a song, as well as the track’s key, tempo and stems using the cryptocurrency ether. All proceeds going to the producers, writers, and the engineers involved in the song’s production.

Heap wrote in an article on Harvard Business Review in 2017 “As a musician, I want to encourage other artists to collaborate with my music.”

“Tiny Human” was the experiment that led the way to “Mycelia,” named after a thread of underground fungus that grows for miles. Heap created a free platform where musicians have control over the data created by their songs as they circulate among fans and other musicians, including the song’s credits, terms of usage dictated by the artist, where the song is played and when, and any transactions. With all the information is tracked using blockchain technology, a method of recording digital transactions first used for Bitcoin.

Two years down the line and Mycelia has become a growing collective of creatives, professionals and lovers of music that also conducts research and campaigns to put artists at the centre of new technological developments.

Mycelia is working on one very interesting project that ties in on some on metadata sharing and transparency. “The Life Of A Song” is a project that aims to analyse the economics of Imogen Heap’s song ‘Hide and Seek’ and explore its relationship with the wider music industry.

This research will breakdown the revenue streams for the song from it’s release in 2005, as well as look at other factors, such as ‘the impact of sync deals, remixes and samples’. It will also look at how it has been used in other works, from Jason Derulo’s ‘Watcha Say’ to YouTube meme Dear Sister and the theatrical production Harry Potter & The Cursed Child.

“The ultimate goal is to explore and visualise how the current global music industry works through the lens of a song, creating a web application that is going to essentially show these three major segments – the biography, the song’s breakdown, and the revenue breakdown. This would allow [individuals] to highlight both what is actually working very well and also the grey areas in the system,” says Carlotta De Ninni, head of research at Mycelia.

Another Mycelia project that has been put on hold for now is an attempt to rewrite some of Heap’s existing contracts to be blockchain-friendly smart contracts.

Heap has mentioned that Mycelia is not to rival streaming services or record labels but to serve as the source of the music. Artists would turn to record labels for things like marketing and promotion. “It’s about trying to take away the power from top down and give power, or at least a steering, to the artist to help shape their own future,” Heap told reporters in 2016

Heap has a lot of Mycelia and what it can do for musicians including how they share and make money from their music. In her own words: “Now is the time for the music industry to take the long-view look and explore blockchain together with its creatives for the sake of its sanity and future. It won’t be hard to make the business more efficient, as it’s such a giant mess right now. The larger players in the industry just need to have faith that they will make more money by doing the right thing — which would lead to fair remuneration, transparency, and a multitude of new business opportunities for artists. Simply put, if the industry is to have any clout, or any say in the sustainability of our music ecosystem, it needs to come together to develop tools and standards, so the necessary game-changing new services can flourish — but this time, under our own internet of agreements for music, where artists would be represented fairly.”