Making music in a bear market: A Bitcoin band's survival experiment

No one needs a Bitcoin band, but they are coming.

Caption: Orange Pill Jam performing live in Lugano, Switzerland.

Michi has a habit that drives collaborators crazy.

When he determines there’s a problem with the recording—it's not just a half-beat off, or a quarter note off, but a different kind of timing unit that only exists in his nervous system—he demands a re-recording. Again and again. The band’s lead singer Mermaid said she couldn’t tell the difference in the first six months. Then, gradually, she started to notice.

It’s worth noting that we are now in a crypto bear market. But Orange Pill Jam is still recording albums.

On the surface, Orange Pill Jam seems like an unusual group. Their music explores financial sovereignty, privacy rights, and the slow decay of certain modern institutions. Their style is eclectic, ranging from gypsy reggae to African Latin to hip-hop, occasionally touching on reggae. They accept Bitcoin payments.

By traditional industry standards, this band isn’t successful. Their YouTube channel has been running for two or three years, with just over five hundred subscribers. Spotify isn’t particularly interested in them either.

However, within certain circles that truly value this, they are genuinely loved. And they are doing something quite difficult: creating music that non-Bitcoin users can enjoy without needing to understand Bitcoin, and that Bitcoin users can enjoy without feeling deliberately pandered to.

1. How Bitcoin Culture Grows Its Own Music

The story begins, like many Bitcoin stories, at a conference.

It was the 2022 Plan B Forum in Lugano. Mermaid wrote a song called “Dollar Apocalypse” as a thank-you gift to all those who seriously create Bitcoin content—especially Max Keiser, the broadcaster and advocate. His podcast, “Orange Pill Podcast,” has long been a must-listen in some corners of the internet.

She wasn’t sure she would actually meet him. But then she did.

A few hours later, someone in the crowd at Satoshi Gallery said, “She wrote a song for you. Let her sing.” Keiser turned around and announced to the room that there would be an impromptu concert. Behind Mermaid, artist Valentina Piccozzi’s resin orange pill art hung on the wall. No microphone, no soundcheck, no warning.

She sang the song. Afterwards, Keiser talked about the importance of Bitcoin art, and Mermaid still remembers it vividly. What she took from it wasn’t a direction, but a question: where is the music? Visual art already has its followers—painters, illustrators, the entire Bitcoin aesthetic world. But music has yet to appear.

Mermaid said that moment “grounded” her. But I suspect what really “grounded” her was the experience of standing in that gallery, singing purely because her voice wanted to come out, without arrangement or rehearsal. It proved to be a reliable indicator of personality. That moment was later brought up again.

She called Michi and proposed a simple idea: turn these guitar and vocal sketches into real songs—professional production, proper rhythm, something that makes people want to dance. He agreed. Three songs became seven, seven became thirteen, thirteen became twenty-one, and, as they say, more songs are brewing.

Here is a glimpse into the process of making one song.

Mermaid is the lead singer and primary lyricist. She writes lyrics first, then sketches melodies around them—more of a contour than a finished piece, knowing what she wants to express but not yet how to develop it. She hands this outline to the band’s producer and multi-instrumentalist Michi, who shapes everything that follows.

Everything else—the performance arrangements, logistics, and the paperwork needed to turn ideas into reality—is handled by co-founder Martino. He’s quieter than the other band members, slightly shy in front of the camera, and doesn’t play an instrument. He doesn’t need to. Someone has to keep the band running, and he genuinely seems happy to take on that responsibility.

Michi’s approach isn’t traditional arrangement but rather using rhythm as a form of argument. Trained as a professional drummer, with the same drummer’s mindset, he treats each instrument the same way—not exploring what the music expresses, but how it moves your body. Mermaid gives the music meaning, and Michi decides when you can feel it.

This division of labor sounds clear, but it’s not. He often makes her re-record the same line, chasing a precision she herself can’t hear. Over time, she learned to trust him. Eventually, the band’s lyrics and rhythms no longer complement each other but collide—this tension is where the music comes alive.

2. Privacy, Sovereignty, and the “Free” Trap Written into the Songs

If you want to understand what this band is really doing, their song “Cypherpunks’ Manifesto” is an excellent entry point—even though the title sounds obscure, the song itself isn’t hard to listen to. It’s upbeat, danceable, influenced by Rosalía, and opens with Spanish vocals.

The first line means: if you want to send me a secret message.

Mermaid explains it’s more than a song about encryption protocols. It’s about a feeling—the desire for a door you can close. She gives a concrete example: your child was just born in the hospital, and you want to send a photo to a few friends, but you don’t want that photo to end up somewhere you can’t control or find later. It should be your choice. Currently, depending on the app you use, that might not be possible.

The song begins here, passing through a series of images, in a danceable pop tune, almost violently precise. There’s a line about airplane mode—switching your phone to airplane mode doesn’t actually make you invisible; if someone is really looking for you, they’ll find a way to contact you. About free products: when something is free, you are the product. She says this stems from observing how Google operates—massive free infrastructure, vast data collection, and your behavior fueling ad feedback loops. “They steal your time, data, and money,” she says, “then take the money back with ads, and you don’t even realize you’re paying.”

Then the song hits its sharpest line, borrowed from Frederick Bascetta via Stacy Herbert’s podcast: when plunder becomes a way of life for a group, they create a legal system that authorizes plunder and craft a moral code that glorifies it.

Mermaid doesn’t present this like an economist. She expresses it with a long-held but still angry attitude. “The mafia turned into politicians,” she says. “No one sees it because it all happens slowly, behind the scenes.” It’s not transcendental. She has no interest in the landscape of nowhere.

The song’s ending approaches personal sovereignty—virtual and physical, coexisting with integrity—more than a conclusion, it’s a direction. An attempt to maintain some consistency on both ends of the screen. She wrote it before going to El Salvador. She returned without changing a word.

The song is about closing the door. “Fire of Freedom” describes what happens after you walk through the flames.

It was written for a conference in El Salvador, where Bitcoin had just been adopted as legal tender. Mermaid read the accompanying declaration repeatedly before writing. Her proudest line: “We are adopting Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is adopting us.” She describes it as a feeling of being embraced—in a world rushing toward something unknowable, this thing she found won’t let go of her.

She wrote it before going to El Salvador. She returned without changing a word. Such a thing is rare in the music industry.

When the performance arrived, it felt more like a confirmation than a debut. The song said everything. The country had just proved that this was true.

3. What Do We See When AI Starts Generating Music?

Michi isn’t particularly surprised that artificial intelligence is reshaping and even squeezing the job market. He notices this change like a skilled painter perceives the arrival of new tools: some small-scale music jobs are quietly disappearing. Video scoring, small tasks—now, with just a prompt and ten seconds, they can be done.

He has a story about this story, involving 19th-century painters and the invention of photography—you’ve probably heard it in some form. In short: photography didn’t kill painting. It forced painting to become something photography couldn’t do, which is why we have Impressionism, Surrealism, and many other art forms that wouldn’t exist if painters had always tried to copy reality as accurately as possible.

Michi believes the musical version of this story is still being written. AI can generate any existing genre of music within the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee, with quality levels sufficient for most needs. It can’t create a genre that doesn’t exist yet, nor find the rhythm space between intention and instinct.

They will use AI for other things—business planning, feedback, administrative infrastructure. But not for music itself.

“Machines should do the dishes,” Mermaid says. “Fold the clothes. Clean the house. I want to sing and dance while the machines clean.” Not the other way around.

The machines haven’t commented.

4. Making Music in a Bear Market: An Anti-Algorithm Survival Experiment

The real challenge of this music project isn’t philosophical. It’s very ordinary.

Revenue is one of the challenges. They are a copyleft project—music that can be shared, remixed, reused by anyone, without permission, and also accepting sponsorships in Bitcoin, dollars, or any currency. Their Geyser Fund page offers free downloadable stems, so anyone wanting to remix or create derivative works can download and use them directly.

“Amount doesn’t matter, good intentions do,” their description reads. In a bear market, such an open stance requires considerable composure and resolve.

Getting heard is harder than sounding good. Every day, 14,000 songs are uploaded to Spotify, most of which are now generated or assisted by tools that didn’t exist three years ago. A band singing about monetary sovereignty isn’t obviously favored by algorithms.

The venue doesn’t help either. Bitcoin conferences are usually held in conference rooms: white walls, fluorescent lights overhead, attendees wearing lanyards, looking at slides all day. “You want to send out energy,” Mermaid says, “but the whole space is absorbing it.” Music needs a room that already knows how to move. They don’t always find it.

Before this interview, host Carine was setting up equipment and playing one of their songs. She forgot to turn it off. When Mermaid and Michi joined the online meeting, she looked up and said: Your music changed the whole room’s atmosphere. Warm. Free. Alive.

An indicator that wouldn’t appear on any streaming dashboard.

Ultimately, this is also the only argument that matters—and the one that connects all other issues. In a bear market, Bitcoin’s reason for existence depends on those who believe in it before the price does. In the age of AI, human creativity relies on those who can describe things that cannot be generated. Orange Pill Jam exists at the intersection of these two views, which is both uncomfortable and a necessary position.

What they build can’t be scaled. It can’t be template-ized, optimized, or copied by others with similar inputs. It’s the product of Mermaid’s unique pursuit of her ideals and Michi’s unique way of embodying ideas—seven years of collaborative effort to find form, still ongoing, an imperfect attempt. In a world where marginal content costs approach zero, this irreducible specificity is the only thing that can’t be devalued to zero.

Algorithms are getting faster. Orange Pill Jam is still in the process of recording its seventeenth take.