Very Bjorkish: Bjork Will Accept Bitcoin for Her New Album
In yet another Bjorkish move–what else would you call it?–Bjork has announced that anyone one wants to buy her new album will be able to use a cryptocurrency.
She and her record label One Littel Indie have teamed up with a British blockchain startup called Blockpool to accept everything from Visa, MasterCard and PayPal to Bitcoin, Audiocoind, Litecoin and Dashcoin, too.
Let’s get MusicAlly to explain
However they choose to pay, each fan will receive 100 AudioCoins – together worth just under $0.19 at the time of writing – as a reward for pre-ordering the album, deposited into an e-wallet created for them by Blockpool.
Fans will be able to exchange the coins for other cryptocurrencies, keep them as an investment, or convert them back into ‘fiat’ currency like pounds or dollars. Over the next two years, they will also be able to earn more AudioCoins by interacting with Björk’s music, live events and digital activities.
It’s one of the most ambitious steps by a musician into the world of cryptocurrency since Imogen Heap’s ‘Tiny Human’ single in 2015, which fans could pay for using the Ether cryptocurrency. The blockchain startup that worked with Heap on that project, Ujo Music, also helped dance artist RAC take payments for his ‘EGO’ album in Ether earlier this year.
There are plenty of musicians who want to start using blockchain technology, thereby creating a direct artist-to-fan-to-artist when it comes to financial transactions, but Bjork is the first time an artist with a global reach has jumped into this pond. Is this some kind of hinge point when it comes the finances of the music industry? We’ll see.
Read more here.
