Royal.io
Royal.io was a music rights marketplace allowing audiences to invest in music they support and co-earn royalties alongside artists. In April 2024, Royal announced they would be sunsetting the marketplace to pivot towards challenges related to AI-generated music.
Website: https://royal.io/
HQ: Austin, Texas, United States
Active Markets: Global
Problem Addressed
Streaming services and other intermediaries like record companies currently benefit the most from musical artist creative outputs, securing the lion’s share of profits generated from sales and streams. Artists and creators miss out on the majority of the value being generated from their work, providing an opportunity for blockchain projects to reimagine existing models of music sales, streaming revenues, and fan engagement opportunities.
Project Description
Royal connected fans and artists through blockchain facilitated shared investment in creative outputs. Artists released music and invited fans and collectors to participate in the royalties generated through streaming. During artist drops, audience members bought tokens representing a percentage of the music’s streaming rights across major platforms such as Spotify. Token purchase also facilitated new forms of audience engagement — artists attached extra benefits such as exclusive tracks, merch, or fan experiences, and token holders could show their support with wallet holdings. Tokens — along with any unclaimed extras and future royalties — were sold at any time, and could appreciate in value with the popularity of artists and songs. Artists on Royal retained independence and creative control, setting the percentage of ownership available for purchase.
Business Data
Status: Active
Constituency Served: Creators/artists, general public
Networks: Polygon
Known Investors: a16z, Coinbase, Paradigm, Cosmic Venture Partners
Additional References: N/a
Progress to date
In Royal’s 2021 Series A funding round, the project raised $55 million to invest in ecosystem growth. Royal has raised a total of $71M in funding over 3 rounds. In January, 2022 hip-hop legend Nas, in a dual-part drop with 3LAU, released his first-ever NFT collection on Royal. The collection — which was the first live sale of NFTs on Royal.io — consisted of 1,870 NFTs across two separate drops, both of which sold out in record time, and generated more than $560,000 in total revenue.
In June 2023, Royal released their Song Valuation Calculator, a tool that provides the “fair market value of [any given song’s] estimated future master streaming royalties.” In April 2024, Royal announced they were working to revamp their entire platform, shifting away from centralized data storage, instead enabling backend infrastructure to store data onchain and opening up smart contract deployments to the public. The project is sunsetting their marketplace but continuing to allow token trades and royalties through OpenSea and the Royal.io site, respectively. Going forward, Royal will be working to address challenges related to AI-generated music.
Business Model
Artists on Royal earn by selling tokens representing portions of royalty percentages to fans, and both parties then earn based on the artist-set total royalty percentage for each song.
Traction
As of January 2023, Royal reports that its partnered artists have paid out over $156,000 in royalties to collectors; raised $2.5 million for artists; and seen $7.5 million in music rights traded across 111 countries.