I’m giving fans 50% ownership in my next single through Royal!
As an independent artist for nearly a decade, I’ve seen all sides of the music industry, fighting uphill battles against the inefficiencies of a legacy system. I’ve been working on ways to create change for the next generation of artists, and discovered that distributed ledger technology could be the most promising solution to a lot of the problems musicians experience on a daily basis. One of my goals as a musician is to not only make unique art, but to build an everlasting symbiotic relationship between artists and listeners.
My career started back in college, when I would DJ house parties just to get my name out there (getting paid in occasional free handles of Smirnoff). I eventually worked my way up to having residencies in my hometown of Vegas, headlining major festivals and releasing a collection of music that has generated over a billion streams worldwide. Now I’m diving headfirst into being a new founder, with a commitment of leveraging blockchain technology to drastically improve conditions for both artists and fans. Through my time as a musician, I always made it one of my priorities to keep control over my career. I never signed over full control to a major label, making me fortunate enough to be able to pick and choose who I work with & what I work on, while maintaining ownership of the rights in my own music. Instead of relying on major corporations for marketing, I leveraged the power of technology and social media to create a community. It started with 3LAU HAUS, then evolved over the years. Then I started to ask myself, what if my listeners and biggest supporters could share the success of my music with me? Why shouldn’t they? After all, I wouldn’t be where I am today without them.
My goal as an avid member of the blockchain community and CEO of my new company royal — is to make that a reality. My long-term vision is that digital collectibles will eventually grow into actual ownership in a song’s master revenue rights, enabling artists to disintermediate the music industry, capturing value alongside their fans.
That’s why today I couldn’t be more pumped to make one of my most exciting announcements ever, kicking off what I hope one day becomes a new standard for song ownership. I’m sharing my next single with my biggest fans.. literally!
I’m dropping my next single, Worst Case, on October 8th and giving away 50% of my streaming revenue ownership to users who win the early access contest on https://royal.io.
Log into your account on royal.io to hear a preview of the track!
You heard that right. Shortly after the completion of the contest, limited digital assets representing ownership in my new single will be minted on Ethereum Mainnet and claimable for winners. We’ll be releasing more details soon.
How do song owners get paid?
One of the most common questions I’m asked is if music actually generates revenue. There’s a pervasive misconception that streaming services don’t pay artists, when in reality, intermediaries end up with the lion’s share of the revenue due to legacy record agreements. The fact is that the music industry has been growing like never before over the last few years and independent artists who maintain ownership have seen revenue growth in multiples of 20–50x.
Spotify, the world’s largest music-streaming service, pays an average of one-third to one-half penny each stream, whereas Apple Music pays a penny per stream. While that doesn’t sound like much, consider how often and by how many users songs are streamed — Apple last reported more than 60 million Music subscribers in June 2019. Spotify leads the industry in subscriptions with 165 million, out of 365 million total active users including those who listen free to the ad-supported tier.
Streaming services pay royalties to rights holders — a group that primarily includes record labels, publishers, and other distributors — who, in turn, pay artists based on the terms of their recording, publishing, and distribution agreements. Both Apple and Spotify compensate rights holders depending on the percentage of total streams generated by their artists on each service’s platform.
Those that benefit the most from streaming are, in fact,labels. Streaming generates $19 million per day for three major music labels.
Meanwhile, artists count their pennies and fans get nothing. Right now, my listeners aren’t compensated at all for that interaction. And with Royal, we’re changing that by creating an incentive for you to be aligned financially and emotionally with your favorite artists, and to own a piece of something you love.
It starts here: you and I become co-owners of the music that I create and you inspire. And we will change the music business together.
