Hume Acquires Blocktones

Hume, a Los Angeles, CA-based Web3 entertainment company creating virtual musicians, acquired Blocktones, a Web3 music startup.

The amount of the deal was not disclosed.

Blocktones expands Hume’s reach throughout web3 and the traditional music industry while scaling its ambitions to help creators launch their own global metastars. The acquisition will bring Blocktones’ open-sourced generative audio collections to the Hume platform, enabling new pathways for its virtual artists and novel ways for creators to create open-sourced music beats.

Launched in 2022 by Grammy-winning, multi-platinum producer Gino Borri, “Gino The Ghost,” and show designer and director Michael Mauro, Blocktones is a multimedia interactive NFT project that combines generative audio and 3D images of the industry’s biggest producers and renowned digital artists, like 7x Grammy-winning producer, Federico Vindver, with special guests Timbaland, Illmind, and Trap Money Benny. The mixed-media collection of full-length, unique radio-ready tracks allows NFT holders to own the IP associated with their beats.

Blocktones’ first collection, featured in Billboard as a top 10 music NFT, is one of the first large-scale Music NFT projects that gave full IP ownership rights to the NFT owner.

Founded by David Beiner CEO, and Jay Stolar, Chief Artist Officer, Hume is bringing virtual artists mainstream and redefining the way fans engage with their favorite virtual characters. It is a web3 record label and an in-house entertainment studio that recently launched web3 virtual artists angelbaby and Clio with others coming soon.

Gino Borri, the Blocktones’ co-founder who will be joining Hume as President of Blocktones & Hume A&R, wrote music for Saweetie to The Chainsmokers. Recently, he executive produced the music behind Snoop Dogg’s Sandbox collection, much of the music behind FLUF World, and topped the OpenSea charts with The Otherside and All Gold Spaceship featuring Hume’s metastar angelbaby.

Blocktones will open new use cases around music creation by allowing producers to create collections through its audio-generative platform.

In Dec. 2022, Hume and Blocktones partnered to host a songwriting camp during Art Basel Miami Beach. The camp brought together web3 artists Reo Cragun and Hume’s angelbaby to utilize OP3N IP Blocktones beats that they own—allowing them to evenly split the master recording and publishing shares. The 2-day camp resulted in the creation of two songs with plans to drop the singles on a web3 platform this year.

The news follows the hire of Universal Music Group and Three Six Zero alum Adrian Karvinen as the new VP of Music Business & Partnerships. Karvinen will be responsible for building culture-shifting partnerships between metastars and the world’s biggest brands to drive engaging and interactive fan experiences.