Ever since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, music and technology have gone together like Simon and Garfunkel, Morrissey and Marr, or the Gallagher brothers. But just like those legendary duos, the relationship between the two hasn’t always been easy.
The past two decades since the explosion of the Internet have been particularly tumultuous, with illegal file-sharing on platforms like Napster and Limewire bringing the industry to its knees in the early noughties. And while the introduction of all-you-can-eat streaming via Spotify, Apple Music et al has largely solved the problem of piracy, it hasn’t really worked out for the vast majority of musicians; just 184,500 of the 1.2 million artists on Spotify make more than $1,000 a year.
Tommy Danvers, aka TommyD, a multi-platinum-selling producer, songwriter, artist, DJ and founder of music-based NFT marketplace Token Traxx, saw that the system was broken. But he wasn’t able to find a solution until the first Covid lockdown in early 2020 prompted him to connect the dots between his love of music and a more recently…
