Deeper and Harder to Show Off: The Ujo Experiment and On-Chain Music’s Identity Crisis
A look back at one of the earliest attempts to use Ethereum to put more power in the hands of musicians
“‘Music NFTs’ are dumb. They always have been,” Jesse Grushack wrote in a candid Twitter thread last January. “A poor attempt at democratizing an existing market.” Where “PFPs [profile pictures] are signaling tools that instantly convey something,” he said, “music is deeper and harder to show off.”
In 2015, Grushack was part of a team at the defunct “crypto Bandcamp,” Ujo Music, a venture born out of the Ethereum-based software company ConsenSys. In partnership with Grammy-winning artist Imogen Heap’s Mycelia project, they minted and sold her song, “Tiny Human” on the fledgling Ethereum blockchain. “We did all the automated splits and everything,” Grushack told me recently. “We thought it was super cool and was gonna change the world.”
Heap, long an iconoclast of an exploitative music industry, was a fitting partner. In 2005, before it was en vogue, she self-released her album, Speak for Yourself. In 2014, she wrapped every song from her LP Sparks into a separate project. She’s even invented a musical glove.
“I have a new song, ‘Tiny Human,’ that I was planning to release, but I just felt like I was going to be adding to my gripes rather than moving anything forward,” she told Forbes a decade ago. “The current options on HOW to go about releasing a song fills me with dread and really puts me off. It’s SO complicated and time consuming, and largely unclear who gets what and why.”
Together, Ujo and Heap challenged that reality, but the experiment is remembered more for its vision than for its success. It sold only 222 copies and earned what amounted at the time to $133.20 in Ether. Technologist and writer David Gerard panned the endeavor as a “disaster,” citing Ujo’s later “apologia” – “we are but a few bright-eyed technologists with a special hammer, looking for the right nail” – as a totem of broader crypto expansionism: retrofit the world with blockchain, whether it needs it or not. Ujo ultimately folded in 2019.
Ten years removed from “Tiny Human,” and after the promise and then precipitous decline of a booming music NFT cycle, Heap’s words feel startlingly germane. What, if anything, have we learned from Ujo’s failure? And is there an on-chain use case for music, or does being “deeper and harder to show off” mean we’ll forever chase that right nail?
Jesse Grushack’s first music industry experience came circa 2011, writing for dance music blogs like Dancing Astronaut. At the time he was at Union College, studying computer science and economics. It’s also when he first encountered Bitcoin.
Simon de la Rouviere
“The first time I ever found Bitcoin, I think it was worth two hundredths of a penny,” he told me. “I tried to borrow my school's supercomputer to mine it, which would have quadrupled the hashrate of the network at the time. But they said no, because it was a gift from IBM and could not be used for financial gain."
After graduating in 2014, he worked in festival technology and production, managing cashless payment systems. Eighteen months into the gig, someone at a New York City tech meetup encouraged him to check out ConsenSys. “The [description said] ‘decentralized venture studio building primarily on Ethereum’ and I was like, ‘cool, I know half those words.’”
In 2015, at an Ethereum meetup, he met ConsenSys CEO and co-founder, Joe Lubin. Lubin and Phil Barry had already begun building Ujo, exploring how smart contracts could ameliorate industry woes like rights and royalties distribution. After an interview, Lubin invited Grushack to join them and support communications.
The founding team splintered that same year. Lubin wanted to keep Ujo internal to ConsenSys, while Barry wanted to raise money for it independently. The physical distance – Lubin in New York, Barry in London – complicated communication, and the latter ultimately left. Heap, too, hesitant to work in close proximity with a corporation – and in part due to Barry’s departure – separated herself from ConsenSys.
On the heels of a lukewarm reception to their “Tiny Human” proof-of-concept, Ujo went back to the drawing board. Grushack was tasked with finding Barry’s replacement. “Joe wanted some powerful music CEO to take this over,” Grushack said. “But no one in the music industry wanted to play with some really nascent tech.”
In 2016, unable to find anyone, Grushack assumed the role. “I spent about a year just getting schooled by the music industry and learning how fucked everything is,” he said. “I was trying to figure out where exactly the best place of attack was.”
In August that year, Ujo published their insights in that same “we are but a few bright-eyed technologists” mea culpa, “Emerging from the Silence.” “From our conversations, it seems that the industry heavyweights would really like someone to clean up the global metadata problem,” they wrote. “More importantly, we heard many recurring themes when speaking with artists: the situation is dire, and it’s becoming harder and harder to be heard in an increasingly crowded marketplace.”
Read more: The Modern Gala: How Latashá and C.Y. Lee Are Meming Patronage into Existence
The Ethereum blockchain, they noted, was not a panacea, but it was great at a couple things: “keeping track of information and replicating that data across a network of computers,” and “building open communities with guaranteed transparency and personal ownership.”
“What does artistic identity look like on the web today, and how might it work on the web of tomorrow?” they asked themselves. “What if we gave artists a truly portable identity and full control of their digital content, and made receiving payments from fans as simple as receiving an email? And what if that identity wasn’t restricted to a single service like SoundCloud, YouTube or any one of the many online music services on the Internet?”
In 2017, Andre Anjos – better known as the Grammy-winning artist RAC – started paying attention to Ethereum and Ujo. He’d just won the “Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical” Grammy for his remix of Bob Moses' "Tearing Me Up.”
“I believe it’s going to revolutionize multiple industries, including my own,” he wrote in a post to the ‘ethtrader’ subreddit. “I'm reaching out to this community because I would like to release my work on the Ethereum network…I reached out to Ujo Music and have not received a reply, so I figured I'd try here.”
"What was funny is that [Ujo Music] didn't see my email because it came in as ‘RAC,’ which was the internal ConsenSys [term for] ‘resource allocation committee,’” Anjos told me last year, laughing. “It was something they were actively ignoring."
The day Anjos posted to Reddit was Jack Spallone’s first as an Ujo product manager. Spallone had first learned of Ujo via the “Tiny Human” collaboration – he’d even cited it in his senior capstone at Rollins College.
“My thesis was that [blockchain] can change streaming payments and could change the efficiency of transparency around streaming payments,” Spallone told me last year. “By the time I finished it, Ujo Music had done the thing with Imogen Heap. So it went from, ‘here's a thesis’ to, ‘oh shit, there are actually companies doing it.’"
Jack Spallone and Andre Anjos (l)
The Reddit post “cascaded into working and meeting Jack and Jesse," Anjos said, and together they put out EGO, the first album ever released on Ethereum, selling out all 140 available copies. “It was just: contract, deposit ETH, get Zip file,” Anjos said. “It was very simple."
As part of the EGO release, Ujo experimented with tokenizing support. “For everyone that bought the album, a digital collector’s item has been issued: a commemorative reminder, forever etched into the Ethereum blockchain,” the Ujo team wrote in a blog post.
“Receipt of the EGO badge is proof that you have supported Andre’s career,” they wrote in another, “either by purchasing the album directly or buying the badge from one of his fans.”
The badge’s utility, they envisioned, could manifest as “social accessibility” or “community building.” “Wouldn’t it be exciting if you could skip the line at the next RAC show in your local city or access a special Ninja Tune tent at the next festival with this badge?” they teased.
Web3 veterans may recognize these conceptual benefits as standard fare for the coming years’ NFT campaigns. But in Ujo’s writing, the term NFT was never used, and little attention was given to the tokens’ speculative value. “The badge conforms to the ERC-20 standard on Ethereum and thus one can freely transfer this badge to others,” they wrote. “We recommend holding onto it!”
NFTs, of course, became a phenomenon because you could easily not hold onto them. ERC-721, which standardized non-fungible tokens – i.e. NFTs – wouldn’t arrive until early 2018, but the groundwork for token interoperability was laid by ERC-20, which remains the technical standard for fungible tokens.
The ERC (Ethereum Request for Comment) enabled interoperability between diverse digital assets on Ethereum, allowing developers to create tokens that can represent everything from currencies to vouchers to voting rights.
ERC-20 was co-authored by Ujo’s blockchain lead, Simon de la Rouviere, who also co-wrote the “Tiny Human” smart contract. “No one called the stuff NFTs,” de la Rouviere told me in 2023. “There was this feeling – no one's gonna call these NFTs because what are you saying? A non-fungible token? It's like an anti-word. Everything is non-fungible – it's fungible things that are weird.”
Read more: No Rights Reserved: How Songcamp's CC0Lab Is Remixing the Creative Act
Instead they called them collectibles and badges. “We were like, ‘this is how people are going to understand it,’” de la Rouviere said. “But then everyone started to ‘collect NFTs’ and that was a really interesting lesson, because ‘digital collectible’ does not entirely encompass why this is a new thing. Fortnite has digital collectibles. Why is this new?
“An entirely new name that encapsulates all the new context is the one that got successful, right?” he continued. “It reminded me of the year of the MP3. People started calling songs MP3s because the format was so different from what was before that it became the name for the music.”
MP3s didn’t become the de facto music format, though, until the iTunes Store and other platforms provided technical infrastructure and commercial scaffolding. And that maturation followed years of lawsuits and existential angst as the industry grappled with the new digital format, which could be easily replicated and shared. The Napster era, of course, quickly followed, validating industry concerns.
In 2017, decentralized tokens didn’t have an iTunes Store. “There was no infrastructure,” Grushack told me. “There were no tools. There were no API's to use. Everything we were building was from scratch. We were just kicking around ideas until something stuck.”
Nor was there an obvious business model. Ujo was not just building the plane while flying it – they were also trying to build the airport. Ultimately, they suffered a crisis of identity. “Were we building something that other applications were going to use to solve their metadata problems?” de la Rouviere wondered. “Or were we building a product that we wanted to give to new creators to earn money from their music and their connection to their fans?”
Added Grushack: “It was too early at the end of the day. No one cared about these badges, no one cared about or understood why you would want to buy things with crypto.”
In early 2019, Ujo Music closed its doors.
Since then, there have been notable infrastructural achievements – in scalability (layer 2 solutions, sharding), blockchain interoperability, improved consensus mechanisms (proof-of-stake), as well as regulatory clarity. Business models have emerged, too, with automated market makers driving decentralized exchanges and dedicated NFT marketplaces generating meaningful revenue through transaction fees.
On-chain music, too, had its moment in the sun. On platforms like Zora, Sound and Catalog, artists earned millions of dollars through NFT sales.
And that system hasn’t disappeared, but it’s strained beneath the weight of a familiar identity crisis. Are NFTs a mechanism for degens and supporters? A collectible to be held, commemorating support for a beloved musician? Or a token of unique fan verification to remedy a system that readily obfuscates audience data from artists?
“What always bothered me was that no one was looking at the fan,” Grushack said. “What we did with the badges was earned. You bought the album, you got the badge. You didn't buy the badge to get the album.
“My biggest frustration with the coming years of NFT platforms was – those aren't fans, right? Those are speculators. Those are patrons,” he continued, highlighting the market dynamics that fueled the NFT gold rush of 2021. “It was frustrating to see that a lot of them weren't taking the lessons we had learned.”
That hasn’t stopped him from staying involved with the ecosystem, though. Since Ujo shuttered, he's invested – via the Six Agency, where he’s a founding partner – in various on-chain music projects, from Royal to Audius to Catalog.
“I didn't feel done. And I still don't necessarily feel done,” he told me when I asked him why. “I really want to see this work because I truly believe that we can build better tools for musicians – to create a more sustainable creative economy.
“That was always the thing because if we're right about everything we're doing, we don't have a job anymore,” he continued. “We automate away most of the work in the world and all we have left is creativity. So if we're not building a system that supports creativity and supports that kind of future, then we're fucked.”
When I moved to London in 2021, I joined a community called The Rattle – in part because Imogen Heap was a backer and advisor. The Rattle was a sui generis mishmash of music and tech and collective values – difficult to define and everything I ever wanted in a community.
At the time, Heap was still pursuing Mycelia, a research and development hub whose primary product was the Creative Passport (which has since become Auracles). The passport is a “digital container to hold verified profile information, IDs, acknowledgments, works, business partners and payment mechanisms.” In a nutshell, by decentralizing identity, we extract power from the corporate, centralized entities that dominate the music industry.
Read more: Re-Rattling the Cage
“We know less about what our songs get up to once they’ve left ‘home,’” she said, explaining how Mycelia could help artists reclaim ownership of their relationships. “What would I like to read on these postcards from our songs? Well, how many times it was played, by who and where would be a great start.”
Grushack agrees. “The ones that deeply understand the industry know that the key is identity,” he told me, echoing another part of his Twitter thread last year: “Identity is the only problem that matters in crypto+music. Once you can identify an artist and connect them to a known fan. That’s when the power becomes real.”
But for some people, anything that smells like crypto is dead on arrival. “Heap’s explicit goal,” wrote David Gerard, citing her above quote, “is to have all music you’ve ‘bought’ (not just hers) behave as marketing spyware that collects data on the user, in the manner of advertising trackers on web pages.”
Gerard’s perspective is the product of a larger identity crisis: who is crypto? The blockchain is just a decentralized database, but it has an off-putting – and oft impenetrable – identity: FTX, Bitcoin, NFTs, DAOs, DeFi, PFPs.
Despite being a tech-forward organization, The Rattle, too, held crypto at arm’s length – unsure how or if they wanted to take on that baggage. They had enough identity challenges to deal with already.
From the outside, The Rattle looked like a music-focused coworking space, but it also had elements of an incubator, a fund and a label. Investors didn’t know what to do with them, and The Rattle wasn’t willing to be anything less than it was. What united them, they said in so many words, was a dedication to a system that “supports creativity and supports that kind of future.”
Imogen Heap credit: Pop!Tech, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
For many, NFTs are not badges or collectibles – they represent investment vehicles and get-rich-quick ploys that have no place in that future. And it wasn’t until they were on the brink that The Rattle’s founders haltingly embraced web3, launching an on-chain token in a last ditch effort to survive.
“It's a bit like an NFT, but instead of just a pointless graphic no one cares about, owning a Rattle Society token is like having a never-ending 'wristband' to The Rattle ecosystem,” the founders wrote in an email blast. “You can keep it, use it, trade it. It never disappears. And its benefits will continue to get bigger and better over time.”
On the inside, we understood what that meant. But people on the outside didn’t. And when the hail mary fell short, The Rattle, too, closed its doors.
We on the inside can see the forest around the trees, but we keep talking about the trees. NFTs don’t contain worlds – they open them. They’re wristbands to a reality where The Rattle can be everything that doesn’t fit on an Instagram profile or a five-minute pitch deck – where Imogen Heap can meet her community outside of a Spotify for Artists page that’s reduced them to IP addresses.
That stale feeling we get from using platforms comes from the fact that who we are resists compression. Music is deeper and harder to show off, just like the relationships that form around it. They're messy, emotional and deeply personal. They cannot be scaled and still maintain that which makes them distinct. And perhaps that's not a bug to be fixed, but a feature to be celebrated. Maybe that’s how we build a future where we’re not fucked.
lead image: Jesse Grushack