We, the People
The story behind Musiconomi
Quite some ink has been spilled over the past few weeks on our breakthrough service that we at Musiconomi aim to bring to the music world. This time we bring the spotlight on the story behind the project.
It all started a little over a year ago when Dan Phifer moved to Hong Kong and met Isaac Mao. They soon got to talking about Isaac’s idea of the Musicoin project and a couple of months later they were already hammering out the details for a blockchain platform that would later lead to the creation of Musiconomi.
Towards the end of 2016, when Musicoin’s cogs were already turning, Brian Byrne stumbled across the Musicoin website and got really excited about the idea. He reached out to Dan and Isaac and together they agreed on one thing: the music industry is broken and their solution could help fix it.
In an interesting twist of synchronicity, Brian had been learning about blockchain universe over the past two years after spending time with blockchain pioneer Anthony Di Iorio (Ethereum co-founder, CEO of JAXX/Decentral) who was a fan of his former band I Mother Earth and when Brian had met while touring in Toronto, Canada.
With Brian also came twenty years of experience and an extensive network within the music industry. It was a perfect fit for the project on multiple levels.
In January 2017, Anthony’s brother Elio Di Iorio — also a fan of I Mother Earth and whom Brian had met along with Anthony two years earlier at a Toronto show — noticed Brian’s tweets about Musicoin, and Elio reached out to Brian to catch up, and also to find out more about the Musicoin platform.
After a few conversations with Brian and the other founders, and just prior to the launch of the Musicoin blockchain, Elio joined the project as the fourth member of the team and began to engage with the community on Slack and immediately started looking for ways to get more involved. Elio would also later be the one responsible for making the connection with Cofound.it.
Shortly after the launch of the Musicoin blockchain, Jared Griego came aboard. He was one of the first miners to use GPUs to mine Musicoin, bringing far more hashpower online than we had been expecting. When asked to tone it down a little his response was something along the lines of: “Oh, is that a problem? OK, I will turn it down — I just really wanted to see this project succeed.” From there on, Jared became a part of the team and worked to get Musicoin listed on Cryptopia and Bittrex.
David Werba joined the team through Brian’s outreach to Indie Music Plus (IMP), first as a Growth Hacker at Musicoin and later becoming CMO as he started to map out the global marketing and branding blueprint. The IMP service already had an established following and steady stream of aspiring musicians that submit their music for review on their weekly show Indie Music LIVE. We saw this as an excellent fit for our platform and agreed to partner with David and IMP to help grow the user base and bring more artists on board.
In the weeks following the launch, Pete Mooney (aka ‘CryptoPete) showed up in our Slack and started regularly making useful suggestions and contributions. The community was growing and lots of helpful suggestions and conversations were showing up in slack, but Pete was going the extra mile and sending in sample UX mock-ups and was able to get some answers to some important technical questions we had.
As we the five founders of Musiconomi had already conceived the Musiconomi project and were beginning to move forward toward a launch, we reached out to Pete and asked him to come along. He immediately accepted and, again, it was another perfect fit.
A Fruitful Partnership
In April 2017, Elio was nominated to actively seek out options for getting us the capital we needed to expand the project and scale the platform. He reached out to Cofound.it early on, and after a few online meetings with Daniel Zakrisson, the two were able to get together for a full day in New York between conferences and hash out a roadmap for the next stage of development. That was when the new MCI token was born.
When the opportunity with Cofound.it was presented, the team saw it as an amazing opportunity. Cofound.it offered a clear plan for running a crowdsale and they knew with funding they could make and run a platform that could scale to millions of users. Isaac Mao was more interested in running the Musicoin blockchain and starting a Musicoin Foundation, so we agreed to separate the project and try to find ways to work together to make Musiconomi and Musicoin successful.
At the same time that Elio had begun communication with Daniel from Cofound.it, he and Brian attended Canadian Music Week where Brian would re-connect with friends and contacts from the Toronto music scene, and also make introductions for Elio. Between the two of them, they would also make a number of new friends and contacts that would make key contributions to the Musiconomi project over the months and weeks to come.
Interest in blockchain-based music was blowing up before their eyes. There were artists, PR people, promoters, label executives and everyone in between who wanted to know more about what we were up to, and were inquiring as to how they could get involved, and plug their content and/or their business into the new platform.
Like everything in the blockchain universe, things tend to happen and change very quickly. Before long we had dozens of key supporters including advisors, artist ambassadors, and strategic partners. Things were taking off and it took a huge collective effort from everyone involved to organize all the moving parts and put together a crowdsale plan as well as a long term business roadmap that would guide the development of the project.
We have been fortunate to have had the success that we have enjoyed to this point, but we don’t chalk it up to simply luck, nor do we feel entitled to anything. We work hard, and we are careful in how we treat each other and everyone that gets involved or has questions. We aim to be kind, sincere and appropriate in everything we do. The result is that we find people with similar values gravitate into our space — people who are looking to contribute simply because they like what we are doing, and they care about music and the people who make it.
So, here we are on the doorstep of our crowdsale and ready to launch what we believe is a truly innovative service. We are pleased that you have taken a few minutes to hear a bit about how this project has unfolded to this point, and we thank you for your interest.
Be sure to keep an eye out for all the details on our website and on Cofound.it’s public Slack, and we encourage you to connect with us to provide feedback or ask any questions you may have.
