Derek Kohn

Royal recap: Building an open market for music rights

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At Royal, we’re bringing together artists and fans by making music ownership accessible. Through tokens, anyone can invest in music, earn streaming royalties, and get exclusive access to curated benefits directly from the artist.

We believe opening up music ownership and investment will shift power and value to artists, offering them a new way to get closer to fans and live off their work while maintaining control over it.

We’re making great progress toward turning our vision into reality. In the last few months….

  • 9,200 fans and collectors have invested in music.
  • Artists have sold more than $1.3 million in music rights.
  • People have purchased Royal tokens in 111 countries.

    • We’ve got a long way to go, and we’re excited for the road (and work) ahead.

    Recap: An exciting year so far

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    On January 20, 2022 we teamed up with hip hop legend Nas for our first-ever drop. He offered 50% ownership in master streaming royalties across two of his hit tracks: Ultra Black and Rare. Both drops sold out quickly.

    Since then, a variety of artists including Diplo, Vérité, and Big Boi have given people a chance to invest in their music. Last month, The Chainsmokers gave away a portion of the streaming royalties from their entire album, So Far So Good, as a way to thank their biggest fans. Token holders aren’t just earning royalties; they’re experiencing for the first time what it means to own a piece of music they love.

    Amidst the drops, we’ve also been working on the product, reading your feedback, and improving the overall experience.

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    Building Royal for everyone

    When we started building, our #1 goal was to make investing in music and participating in drops on Royal approachable and easy for any music fan — as easy as checking out on Amazon.

    We leverage distributed ledger technology to power Royal, but we are building for everyone who loves music. You see that through early and intentional choices that we launched with, like accepting credit cards, pricing tokens in dollars, and not mentioning NFTs on our site even though we use them to prove ownership.

    You also see it in features that we launched more recently, like posts, which offer token holders a user-friendly way to receive exclusive content and information from artists. We didn’t originally plan to build posts as early as we did, but we learned very quickly that token holders wanted a simple way to get updates and hear directly from the artists they support.

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    Your dashboard provides an interactive view of music investments

    Your dashboard now includes key info about the music you own on Royal. Keep track of the value of your collection, which is calculated based on recent secondary market sales. Plus, see how the songs have streamed in the last 30 days on Spotify and Apple Music.

    You can also check which extras are redeemable and view other details about your tokens. And those artist posts we mentioned above… those are on your dashboard too.

    Next up: Building a better music rights market

    Royal is continually evolving and we’re stoked for you to see what’s in store. We’ll be releasing even more music with top artists and emerging talent. Plus, our product team is working on new updates such as:

  • Making drops more accessible: We’re experimenting with new sales formats to give more people an equal shot at buying a token. We’d love your feedback as we roll these out!
  • Claiming your royalty payouts: Next month, we will launch our royalty payout product. Starting with Nas and Vérité, token holders will be able to view and claim payments from the dashboard under earnings. Owners of 3LAU’s track, Worst Case, received our first-ever royalty payout earlier this year via airdrop. With our payouts product, we’re prioritizing accessibility to ensure you can easily transfer funds directly to your bank account, which will be coming soon after launch.
  • Delivering on extras: The exclusive content, access, and experiences that artists offer token holders are an exciting benefit of ownership. After we deliver on the two products mentioned above, we’ll be investing in tools for artists to make it easier for them to reliably deliver a range of extras. In the meantime, you can expect exclusive content and digital benefits that artists will deliver via posts; physical extras and experiences, like merch and concert tickets, will be reserved for much more exclusive top tier tokens.

    • Want to learn more about these updates? Our product team is hosting an AMA Townhall on Discord on Friday, June 24 at 12:30pm CT. Click here to join.

    Closing thoughts

    There’s so much more to come, and your excitement about what we’re building is incredibly rewarding and energizing. Together, we’re enabling artists and fans to connect like never before through shared ownership.

    If you haven’t already, join the Royal community to get drop announcements and other updates delivered straight to your inbox. We can’t wait to bring more music to the platform and continue to learn how to provide a better experience and make sharing ownership easy for artists and approachable by fans.