A Grammy Award Winner Is Using Ethereum & Harry Potter To Fund Her Blockchain Project

Musician Imogen Heap is working on her very own blockchain project, Mycelia, that will let musicians store all the information about their songs in one place and so they can easily track payments for their songs. The Harry Potter musical is allowing Heap to fund the project as well as Ethereum, of which Heap used to by selling a song for cryptocurrency. Heap appeared in Dublin at the MoneyConf conference this week to about the new project, Mycelia. Heap wants to create a blockchain based app which will allow musicians and artists to store all the data about their work in one neat place. However, no central repository currently exists for information such as recording rights, compositions rights and publishing rights. Heap told Business Insider:

“It’s about how to ease flow of payment, how to ease collaboration, how to grow partnerships how to make better collaborations on a business level and a creative level.”

She went on to say:

“If you’re just a new musician out there and you don’t know what to do, how do you know where to sign up? This is a guide as much as anything, a way to help the music maker navigate the industry.”

Heap confessed that blockchain wasn’t the only way to solve this issue however, she did mention that she is eager to jump on the cryptocurrency bandwagon. She said:

“There are many ways to do it, but for me, it’s important to be in this space because it’s a growing space and the music industry has to move with the times and I just want to make sure that we’re here and prepared, the music makers are prepared.”

Heap has had the idea for creating Mycelia for about three years, but she is now ready to take action on it and take the idea forward, and she hopes to have an app out by September this year!

“I didn’t expect to be able to develop a thing – I didn’t want to, to be honest, I just wanted to make music. I thought if I could just share an idea maybe someone would make something but in the end nobody was doing this thing,”

said Heap. Heap is funding the project herself, she also said that her work from the Harry Potter musical has greatly benefitted the project.

“I’m also in a position, thanks to Harry Potter to be honest, that I’m not needing to make money on the next album and the next tour. I’m just lucky to be in a position where this magic play is essentially giving me a wage every week, which has never happened in my life before.

However, it wasn’t just Harry Potter which got her to where she is today. She also owes her success to the recent surge in cryptocurrencies over the past years. In 2015 Heap released her song, Tiny Human on the Ethereum blockchain which allowed people to buy her song in exchange for ether.

“People paid $1, or 1 ETH, which was equal to $1 at the time,” She went on to say, “that was $200. I didn’t think anything of it and then, it went massively up and I took a bit out and put it into the project, and then it went massively down. It went up to $200,000.”

As of 14^th June, Ether is trading at $480. In early January Ether reached a peak of more than $1,200 per coin before declining with the wider digital currency market.