How TEIA Could Resurrect The Original Music dApp on Tezos
Back when Hicetnunc (HEN) first took off, there was a massive influx of art on Tezos. This flood of artists world wide, minting incredible creations from every style, included a wave of music. However, there was a different dApp doing the heavy lifting to get the music heard in an otherwise visually dominant digital art world. It worked in harmony with Hicetnunc, serving as a separate hub to host and showcase all of the amazing music being minted on HEN.
When you wanted to specifically discover new music on Tezos, you could go to HEN Radio, and instantly begin listening to music minted/published on Tezos. This site was simple, humble, and raw, but it performed a very powerful service of automatically indexing audio NFTs across Tezos network as they were minted. In other words, when a music artist would drop an audio based NFT on Hicetnunc, it would instantly appear on the Hen Radio feed. This made it much easier for music lovers to enjoy music on Tezos.
For a moment, it felt like Tezos based art platforms were syncing and flowing together in a way that could have solved one of the bigger challenges for music NFTs, making them equally accessible in a world dominated by visual content. In this article I want to remember this amazing platform with all of you. Let’s take a look at what it was, what it is now, and what it could be, if HEN Radio were to be resurrected.
What Happened To Hen Radio?
Hen Radio was revolutionary for its time, but it had some inevitable battles to fight both with markets and infrastructure. Music files are large, and musicians often don’t like compression. This creates larger upkeep cost for sites that host music sharing. When you also factor in cover art, this alone could explain why music sharing is complicated and expensive to host both in Web2 and Web3.
Eventually Hen Radio developers had to disable the feature that was syncing new mints automatically. You can still visit the site and listen to earlier music NFTs, but it’s become more of a time capsule, not a place to discover new music.
Making Music on Tezos Today
Music on Tezos is still alive, but it’s scarce and we need more tools for curation and discovery. The truth is that music remains underrepresented across legacy social media and most NFT marketplaces. Outside of the monopolized streaming giants paying fractions of pennies per stream to artists, there’s little infrastructure for independent artists to be heard, let alone thrive.
Where do listeners even find new music these days? Discovery is fragmented. Links are shared on social media, but visibility depends on being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people. Outside of mainstream pop culture and billboard charts, there are few options for independent artists and potential fans to collide organically.
Because few options exist, interest is apparent, especially through initiatives like TezTones, with live shows and artist competitions. The response from Tezos community over the first two seasons of TezTones Artletics Premier League alone shows that the appetite is there, but the tools needed to support those artists have yet to fully materialize. In an NFT space built on visual media, music is still looking for its lane.
That’s why the conversation around reviving HEN Radio matters, and I am excited to see them taking place in TEIA community chats.
How TEIA Is Working to Revive HEN Radio
TEIA is the community-driven evolution of hicetnunc, formed to preserve and extend the hen legacy. Today, teia.art runs on an improved version of the original Hicetnunc smart contract. Within this decentralized ecosystem, conversations about bringing HEN Radio back are ongoing.
People are working behind the scenes, and there are real challenges to overcome. Whether you’re a musician or a lover of music, to become part of the conversation, you can join the TEIA community discord here, and look for the hen-radio sub channel.
Currently, one of the biggest changes needed is related to compression. Many music artists want to mint audio NFTs as uncompressed WAV files, which are great for quality, but rough for infrastructure. Especially when you’re trying to stream every song minted on an entire blockchain, this is where early Hen Radio devs ran into the most trouble. To address this, TEIA community is discussing the development of a minting flow that will auto-generate a compressed MP3 version for playback, while preserving the original uncompressed file for collectors.
There’s also a new minting page in discussions, that would be tailored specifically for audio. This will streamline the process for musicians, reduce bloated file uploads, and align with re-establishing the automatic indexing that once made HEN Radio such a powerful tool.
The codebase has already been migrated to a more modern Next.js framework, laying the foundation for scalable progress. Everything is open source and available on github here, so the ground work is there to build upon.
The TEIA team has been transparent. Working with audio on-chain is more complex than image files. It takes more time, more storage, and more care. But the drive to bring music back to life with hen radio is real and growing. With a solid plan and break down of funding needed, the ground work to bring this program to life is right in front of us.
Why It Matters
Web3, at its core, is about ownership, autonomy, and access. But without music, where’s the soul?
Right now, most blockchain music lives in social feeds. A post, a few listens, and then it’s buried by the algorithm. Discovery is broken. Streaming is almost nonexistent. You can mint a track, sure, but where does it go to be discovered by new ears?
That’s why tools like HEN Radio matter. It made music feel alive, current, connected, with the space to breathe and get heard. At its height, it wasn’t a stretch to believe that Web3 could empower music artists rather than exploit them like the current industry giants do, and there is a chance for new heights still.
If Web3 wants to carry that torch, it has to remember what came before it. Music doesn’t follow markets. It follows people. And when people come together around music, thats what makes waves. A key recipe to any revolution. That was the spirit of early HEN Radio, and that same spirit can rise again.
Build the Stream, and Music Will Flow
Even if HEN Radio isn’t fully functional yet, the tide is turning. The music industry is changing. This is the moment for independent artists to build something new and as a musician, this movement is very close to my heart and soul.
We see pioneers continue to innovate out of pure passion, like with Agoria Music releasing his generative music project “Getaway” in December of 2024. This project showcased how music itself can expand as an art form in harmony with web3.
If you’re a music artist, don’t wait. Keep minting. Keep showing up. Your sound gives the internet its soul. Tezos blocks may be produced like a steady heartbeat , but the rhythm, the resonance, the life? That’s you.
To the wider Tezos community, this is your call to action. Music deserves better tools, better support, and better visibility. Whether you’re a dev, a designer, a collector, or just someone who feels what music brings, your help matters. Join the conversation and help build the future of music on Tezos.
The stage of Hen Radio is still there. Let’s refurbish it. Let’s turn the volume back up and jam out!
Remembering HEN Radio was originally published in Tezos Commons on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.