Jonathan Mann is a musician who has written, recorded and released a new original song every day since January 1, 2009, as part of an ongoing project called Song a Day.,Since 2018 Mann has minted each song as an NFT paired with an illustration and auctioned it over the following 24 hours.,Mann lives in Hartford, Connecticut.
Mann began writing songs at age twelve. Mann studied at Bennington College and later at CalArts, creating a rock opera based on Super Mario that aired on the television channel G4. A song written using a critical TechCrunch column's own text as lyrics was posted on the site within minutes, and Mann became an unofficial staff songwriter for the outlet.In 2010 Mann wrote a song defending Apple during the Antenna-Gate controversy. Apple played it to open a press conference, and Steve Jobs can be seen dancing to it while walking onto the stage.Mann holds the Guinness World Record for the most consecutive days writing a song.
In September 2017, as the early NFT project CryptoPunks drew a fast-growing following, Mann wrote a song about it, with the lyric “A crypto fever dream, tell me, what does it mean?”Mann minted a first song as an NFT, B-U-I-D-L, in 2018, and has sold every song written since then as an NFT. In 2024, after the SEC's settlement with Stoner Cats raised fears that Mann's own practice was in similar legal jeopardy, Mann wrote and sold a song titled This Song is a Security.Mann and law professor Brian L. Frye then sued the SEC in a Louisiana federal court on July 29, 2024, asking the court to declare that selling art as an NFT does not violate securities law.,In 2025 Mann live-coded Coldplay Canoodlers, a point-and-click game, after a couple's on-camera reaction at a Coldplay concert went viral online.,The game invited players to search a stadium crowd of 65,000 for the two people involved.At the artist Mitchell F. Chan's urging, Mann minted the game as an NFT.
