So I was researching Copyright and Blockchain topics and came across this Medium article: https://medium.com/hatching-amazing/part-1-how-my-ssn-prevented-me-from-buying-music-on-the-blockchain-and-why-blockchain-for-music-a85eaeaca7ad. In January 2016, the authors attempted to download Imogen Heap's song from the UjoMusic platform, which allows users to buy and download songs paying with Ether. Imogen Heap started exploring music on the blockchain just before that, as described in this article. In June 2017, Imogen Heap published an article on HBR on that matter, delving into Ujomusic as well. Since the Medium article is almost 3 years old, and there has been a lot of development in the blockchain area, I gave it another go. Here is what I experienced:
First of all, at the beginning of all this, I did not own any Ether. The entire experience probably is another thing if you already own some (you can basically skip to step 24 if you already have MetaMask installed).
For starters, I went over to ujomusic.com to just get to know the platform a little. They address creators and listeners, providing means for music creators to sign up and register their songs on the Ethereum blockchain and allowing music lovers to browse songs and artists. In order to show you just how long the process was, I'll provide a step-by-step of what I did.
1) I went to ujomusic.com.
2) Clicked "Discover".
3) Clicked on any song (note that I could NOT find a search box, thus I just randomly clicked on some songs and hit play (yes, you can listen to them online without buying them. Also, I did not find Imogen Heap in the list of artists. Later on, I learned that Imogen Heap released her song on the Alpha version of ujomusic. Let's talk about this later)).
4) Ok, let's just get this one song. There is a button below the track saying "Use Web3 to buy". Whatever that means, I'll just click on it.
5) I got redirected to a page explaining how to install a Chrome plugin called "MetaMask" (note that until that point I was using Firefox...).
6) Read the article, copied the URL, switched to Chrome.
7) Inserted the URL into Chrome and followed the instructions to install the MetaMask extension in Chrome - pretty straightforward.
8) After the installation successfully finished, a tiny fox icon appeared in my Chrome toolbar (which I find hilarious on a random note since I just switched to Chrome from fireFOX after all).
9) Out of sheer curiosity I clicked on that icon, and a pop-up opened suggesting the install of a new version. What? Whatever. Just do it.
10) A new tab opened, guiding me through the MetaMask signup process. I am to create a password and accept Terms of Use, Privacy Notice and a Phishing Warning. Uuuuh sounds very promising.
11) For password recovery I got a backup phrase (that was a first to me, I got a number of words in a certain order, had to write them down and for confimation put them in the right order).
12) That's all for the MetaMask account creation. Now the fun began: Depositing Ether into that account.
First of all, at the beginning of all this, I did not own any Ether. The entire experience probably is another thing if you already own some (you can basically skip to step 24 if you already have MetaMask installed).
For starters, I went over to ujomusic.com to just get to know the platform a little. They address creators and listeners, providing means for music creators to sign up and register their songs on the Ethereum blockchain and allowing music lovers to browse songs and artists. In order to show you just how long the process was, I'll provide a step-by-step of what I did.
1) I went to ujomusic.com.
2) Clicked "Discover".
3) Clicked on any song (note that I could NOT find a search box, thus I just randomly clicked on some songs and hit play (yes, you can listen to them online without buying them. Also, I did not find Imogen Heap in the list of artists. Later on, I learned that Imogen Heap released her song on the Alpha version of ujomusic. Let's talk about this later)).
4) Ok, let's just get this one song. There is a button below the track saying "Use Web3 to buy". Whatever that means, I'll just click on it.
5) I got redirected to a page explaining how to install a Chrome plugin called "MetaMask" (note that until that point I was using Firefox...).
6) Read the article, copied the URL, switched to Chrome.
7) Inserted the URL into Chrome and followed the instructions to install the MetaMask extension in Chrome - pretty straightforward.
8) After the installation successfully finished, a tiny fox icon appeared in my Chrome toolbar (which I find hilarious on a random note since I just switched to Chrome from fireFOX after all).
9) Out of sheer curiosity I clicked on that icon, and a pop-up opened suggesting the install of a new version. What? Whatever. Just do it.
10) A new tab opened, guiding me through the MetaMask signup process. I am to create a password and accept Terms of Use, Privacy Notice and a Phishing Warning. Uuuuh sounds very promising.
11) For password recovery I got a backup phrase (that was a first to me, I got a number of words in a certain order, had to write them down and for confimation put them in the right order).
12) That's all for the MetaMask account creation. Now the fun began: Depositing Ether into that account.
13) After redirection to a different page, I get three options to do the deposit:
a) from existing funds [I don't have any]
b) buy on Coinbase [what's that?]
c) deposit with ShapeShift [apparently that allows you to use a different crypto currency. Don't have any]
14) That leaves me with b) - Coinbase. Clicked on that option, got redirected to a Coinbase page with a dialog window and no means of navigation or information.
15) Specify amount (in Euro, might be due to my locales, I am sitting in Germany). I went for 3 €, had to enter my e-mail address and full name and agree to T&C and Privacy Policies. If that's all that would have been easy. Well it's not.
16) I then had to confirm my e-mail address by entering a code that was sent to that address
17) Next, the dialogue wanted me to add a phone number, which I couldn't skip. For the sake of science, OK. Did it. Got a code sent to my phone, had to enter that into the dialogue.
18) Done? No. Next is ID verification. Seriously? Whyyy?
19) At that point I started exploring other options. I had heard about the possibility to obtain Ether through mining. Thus I started putting some minutes into researching mining options. Pretty soon I learned that my 2014 laptop would not be able to provide sufficient mining power to get to any reasonable result. Duh. Researching Coinbase, I learned that it apparently is not meant for use in Germany (I read that on some comments on the internet, not in the T&C, because who reads them, anyways). I decided to ignore that comment for now, and returned to the ID verification process.
20) They wanted some kind of picture ID, so I just selected a random student ID just out of curiosity, which, of course, didn't work. Instead, I got hung up on that veryfication screen which I could not abort or go back from. I reloaded the page, it asked my for my phone number and sent me another code via text message. Upon entering that code I was redirected back to where I last stopped the process (at first, this process confused me, but it kept doing that whenever I got thrown off track which turned out to be quite convenient).
21) I tried my driver's licence next. Didn't work. Then I started wondering if they were accepting German IDs at all, and started googling. Apparently, a lot of people seemed to have succeeded. Also, it appears that Coinbase is a legitimate currency exchange which a lot of people seemed to trust in. I took a leap of faith and uploaded pictures of my real ID. (note that I do not feel good about it at all...but curiosity won. Again.)
22) Then they started asking questions like what will I be using the Ether for (online purchases, trades, ...), what's my source of income, last 4 digits of my SSN as well as address information. They know basically everything about me now. Now that I am writing this down I feel even more weird about having done that 3 days ago.
23) Using my VISA card, I finally managed to succeed with my Ether purchase. The amount I purchased immediately showed up in my newly created Coinbase account and instantly thereafter transferred to MetaMask.
24) Now I felt like meeting the basic conditions to be a Ujomusic user. So I headed back over to the music platform, selected a song. It says it's free. What? The button beneath the "this record is free" line still says "Use Web3 to buy". Clicking it still redirects to the MetaMask install guide. Did I do something wrong? Clicking on that fox icon in my Chrome toolbar shows that the Ether ended up in my MetaMask account alright.
25) Reload the page. Behold! A MetaMask notification popup asks me to connect with Coinbase. Connect I do.
26) "Use Web3 to buy" now says "sign up to purchase". Hm. Okay. I click that button.
27) I get redirected to a Ujomusic signup page (or is it?) and at the same time another MetaMask notification pops up asking me to "sign" (I guess sign the transaction with Ujomusic). I click "sign". No further signup required, I do not need to provide any information to Ujomusic.
28) Another redirect back to the song page now shows the button saying "buy release" (remember, above that button it says it's free)
29) Click that button. Let's do this. We're almost there!
30) A MetaMask notification details the transaction information. The song is free alright, but I have to pay gas of course, which amounts to 0.33 $ (which seems quite a lot to me, but then again, the network is growing, isn't it). I can still decline or confirm. I confirm.
31) The page now shows a download button, also mentioning that I could always come back and download again. I then get a Windows notification (!) that the transaction was confirmed, and at the same time the music file is downloaded in a zip file.
32) It is an .mp3 file and it does play. Mission accomplished!
Conclusion 1: Compared to what was tried in 2016 I cannot quite say if using MetaMask and Coinbase is easier than the Kraken solution back in the days, since the authors stopped when they were asked to upload their documents. The process to obtain a song once you already own Ether appears to be a lot more straightforward than the 7 step process that was described in the Ujomusic Alpha guide. No more manually entering addresses, everything is handled through MetaMask.
But now, to the test! Does this work for Imogen Heap's song on the Alpha Version of Ujomusic, too? The front page of ujomusic.com features a link to learn more about Imogen Heap's song, and redirects to http://www.alpha.ujomusic.com/ which leads to https://imogen2.surge.sh/#/imogen_heap/tiny_human/tiny_human. This looks a lot more like the project Imogen Heap described: The song is shown in the center of the page, with lines going out from it naming contributing parties such as Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, a Mastering Engineer, the Brass Ensemble etc. offering detailed information about all artists who contributed to that song. The page has a detailed credits section, also the "stems" of the song (unfortunately they won't play, but it was supposed to be the drums, violins, bass, brass, etc. sections of the song which you could listen to), the lyrics, information about what inspired her to do the song and - las but not least - licensing. Now for the disappointing part: "Purchasing is disabled for now". At least the play button at the center of the page lets me listen to a snippet of the song.
So, let's just try with another song from the Ujomusic beta: Selecting a song, I click "buy release". MetaMask notification opens, giving me info about the transaction, gas is a lot less now by the way (only .16 $), and I decide to buy it. Confirm. Download link clicked, downloading, done. That's easy.
Conclusion 2: I would love to see Imogen Heap's initial idea of a world music database (http://myceliaformusic.org/) combined with what Ujomusic now does: Easy music purchases and downloads, while getting lots of background information on the song. I am also still missing a search option in Ujomusic, and downloading a track will give me no information about how I could use that song (i.e. licensing info is missing). There is no blog indicating that Ujomusic plans to move forward, but since the beta is working quite nicely I am not yet ready to give up hopes. What I still don't get though (might be due to my lack of financial background knowledge) is why it has to be so difficult to buy Ether. Why can't I just buy Ether using PayPal or my Visa Card like anything else online without having to provide all my personal information? Wasn't the purpose of Ethereum to also allow anonymous acting on the internet? But then again, do we want that? Thinking about this, not using proper ID verification processes of course also empowers abusive use of anonymous purchasing options. For now, it's "buy hardware to mine or pay with your data [or fetch some on the dark web]". Let's see what the future holds.
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