Owned, Not Claimed Thirty years ago, "Cosmic Conspiracy" was track 1 on a cassette EP. Last night it played back as an encrypted, on-chain music video that nobody can ever take from me. Here's the story & how it works.

I recorded Cosmic Conspiracy as CHAINSAW SCULPTOR more than thirty years ago. It went onto a cassette, the way songs did then. I remastered it in 2001. And then, for a long time, I just… sat on it. That wasn’t laziness. It was on purpose.

Cosmic Conspiracy by CHAINSAW SCULPTOR

A while back I watched the music business teach me the same lesson twice. Years after a one-year distribution deal had ended, a distributor was still claiming the copyright to my own recordings — to the point where I got a copyright strike, on YouTube, for using my own song. Then the next wave arrived: AI systems hoovering up everyone’s catalogues, and takedowns flying in every direction. Different decade, different technology, exact same problem: other people deciding they own the thing I made. So I made a quiet decision. that I wouldn’t be handing my music to the streaming platforms. If I couldn’t own it - provably, permanently - I’d rather it stay on the shelf. Last night it finally came off the shelf. And it came back better than I left it.

What I actually did I put Cosmic Conspiracy on-chain - not a link to it, not a copy hosted somewhere that can vanish, but the whole thing, living inside a single Bitcoin (BSV) transaction: the lossless remaster (the real audio, not a lossy stream), a music video — animated scenes made and cut to the song, the lyrics, timed line-by-line highlighted as you listen, cover art, front and back, and a spinning “disc” while it plays, all of it encrypted, so only someone who holds a copy can unlock and play it. I minted 21 of them. They sit in my wallet. Not on a platform. Not on someone’s server. In a place no label, distributor, or algorithm can strike, claim, or quietly delete. When I opened my own copy, it decrypted and played - audio, video, lyrics, the lot and honestly, I couldn’t believe it I’d finally done it.

How it works (the short, non-scary version) If the term “NFT” makes you think of jpegs, scams and pump ‘n’ dumps, fair enough. After all of them were little more than a receipt pointing at a picture living on someone else’s hard drive. This is the opposite. Everything is in the token. The audio, the video frames, the lyrics, the artwork — all of it is written into the blockchain transaction itself. There’s no “the file is hosted at this link” step that breaks in five years. It’s permanent the way the chain is permanent. The blockchain timestamps it. The moment it was minted is recorded, publicly, forever. That’s proof of authorship with a date on it - the single thing that, fifteen years ago, would have ended that copyright dispute in about ten seconds. It’s encrypted to holders. Anyone can see the cover and the description; only people who own an edition can unlock the music and the video. For a song that’s been out on cassette for decades, I don’t need a vault - I just want ownership to mean something.

I made all of it myself, with a little set of tools I’ve been building with Claude Opus 4.8: one to create (the artwork, the scene video, the timed lyrics, the lossless master), one to own (the wallet that mints and plays it), and one to sell (a storefront that, when you list, verifies the genesis right back to the day it was created).

No middleman owns a piece of it. No platform can flip a switch. It’s mine, it’s provable, and it’s permanent.

Why it matters (to me, anyway) I’m not here to sell you on blockchain. I’m here because I’m an old musician who got tired of other people claiming my work, and for the first time I’ve got a way to put a song into the world where “owned” actually means owned - and to prove I made it, on a date, that nobody can argue with.

Same problem, different technology — except this time the technology is finally on the artist’s side.

Cosmic Conspiracy waited thirty years for a home like this. It was worth the wait.