The problem the band faced was
copyright. Massive Attack relied heavily
on samples, which meant ensuring
hundreds of publishers, labels and
artists got a credit and a share of
royalties for songs sampled. The band
secured a special agreement from all of
them to allow Ritual Spirit to be released
for free. But for Fantom to work, Del Naja
realised, he needed to ensure that the
original artists were recognised.
“YouTube can’t recognise the source
of a piece of music if it’s too distorted,”
Melchior says. “The risk with Fantom
was that tracks stitched together
from different bits of music needed
to provide proper rights attribution.”
Melchior approached London-
based startup Blokur to guarantee that
Massive Attack’s sample-heavy music
could be remixed and distorted beyondrecognition by algorithms in Fantom,
but also to ensure that the original
copyright holders could get paid.
Blokur had been founded in 2017 by
music industry veterans Andrés Martin-
Lopez and Phil Barry, who lead the team
that released Radiohead frontman Thom
Yorke’s 2014 solo album on BitTorrent.
The app used technology that samples
audio signatures by identifying the
unique blend of pitch, tone, volume,
tune, voice, instruments and all the
other elements that make up a song’s
fingerprint. It then leaves a copy of the
fingerprint – along with the names of
the rights holders, from the performer to
the songwriter, the publishing company
and the record label – on the Ethereum
blockchain. The blockchain is like a vast
irrevocable ledger, a record of ownership
that cannot be altered. Algorithms can‘ REPURPOSE YOUR
OWN MATERIAL
INTO DNA AND
PUT THAT INTO A
SPRAY PAINT
CAN: THAT’S
MAKING IT INTO
SOMETHING NEW’