How did i get here?

Did you know?

Back in 2020, I got wind of the fact that Bitcoin Lightning was being added to RSS.

In normal English: podcasts were about to have a way of letting listeners support creators directly, globally and peer-to-peer.

No middlemen. No cancellation, No De-monetisation bollcoks. Just listeners and supporters sending value directly to the people making the stuff they liked.

Obviously, I did what any sensible, forward-thinking adult would do. That was being told to stay at home by their disgusting government.

I started a podcast about salons/hair industry with my “hair dad”. An industry veteran and self proclaimed bes tblow dry in London.

Joe Mehmet — multi-London-salon owner, entrepreneur and man who i have tolerated for many years. Appeared on my first show and never left.

We called it Salonomics.

The plan was simple: talk business, economics and how we had success in our respective hair careers, i’d drop into the conversation stuff about bitcoin and how a salon owner in the UK should have a small allocation of Bitcoin to help counter the effects of inflation on their businesses.

A sort of financial Trojan horse.

I genuinely thought they might listen.

Alas, They did not.

Which, as it turns out, creating the show was excellent preparation for the next six years of my life.

The podcast was recorded during the glorious shitshow that was Covid, and after 64 episodes in one year, we had gradually moved away from trying to talk about the hair industry and towards throwing politicians under the bus.

Frankly, it was probably more cathartic for us.

Yet, Salonomics was much more important to me than that.

It was my first proper experiment with what this technology could actually do.

Not just Bitcoin.

Not just money.

but peer 2 peer V4V on the unstoppable bitcoin network.

It did not take long to realise people were now hacking (improving) rss (Sir Spencer Joe Martin) by publishing music on the rss protocol and discover a new interoperable ecosystem where artists could also use RSS & Nostr to publish their music once and reach listeners globally on hundreds of apps & clients and receive value directly from the people listening?

Fast forward a few years…

Hello, Valueverse.

We are Decentralising music!

Without labels, without Spotify & without permission. We are publishing artists, producing shows irl and livestreams with worldwide audiences.

I’ve published over 160 songs from 14 different artists to date. Hosted 8 shows and produced 6 live streams.

Looking back, I was right. David Bowie was right. This is an alien life form and it’s still evolving before our eyes. And it’s fun. Just like the Internet used to be.

Dip a toe in, the water is lovely and warm.

End.

You can still listen to all 64 episodes of Salonomics — including my personal favourite, “At Home with The Bin Ladens” — here:

Listen to Salonomics on Fountain

And if you wanna taste of valueverse music go and check out every act i’ve introduced to v4v here: https://bitcoinessex.co.uk/new-music-nudge-unit/