Coming from the perspective of an underground artist
Royal is a new platform for musicians.
NFT’s have completely taken over crypto and more specifically Ethereum! But…what about music? There are many use-cases that make NFT’s the perfect wrapper for visual art, but there has to be something for music also… This is where Royal.io comes into play, created by Justin Blau and the Royal team based out of Austin, TX.
Justin Blau | 3LAU
3LAU is a musician also known as Justin Blau, who has sold many NFT’s of his own music and albums. However, he has a yearning for further development into the tokenization of music and has frequently discussed this topic on podcasts and youtube videos. I highly recommend listening to the latest Bankless episode that features Justin Blau and his concept in a way that is easy to digest and honestly, very exciting!
Justin Blau is much more than a musician, however and has a background in tech, pushing him more towards development and curation in the later parts of his career. His latest venture into development for musicians is Royal.
Reading this article from Forbes tells us that Royal received $16 million in seed funding from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Paradigm, which was created by the co-founder of Coinbase.
What is Royal?
“Own a piece of your favorite music with Royal.”
Royal offers a tokenization service for musicians to really take full ownership of their music, receiving royalties and payments for any tracks or albums released. This works very similarly to NFT’s but is inherently different.
This would give musicians like you and me the opportunity to attach a store of value to our music! Trading music and betting on futures and the potential of smaller musicians that might not have been discovered yet opens up a completely new venture into the world of social tokens, without actually relying on a social token, but an actual piece of art that is listened to, streamed and sold.
Lets discuss an example of how something like this could develop into a much more robust and rich ecosystem. We can do this by taking a look into PleaserDAO and the conceptual art curation they have started. Something like this would be very easy to implement for Royal, and would require no involvement from the team at Royal whatsoever.
PleaserDao started with a few people in a group chat pooling their money together to buy culturally significant NFT’s and then holding them in a “Bank” of sorts (a multi-signature wallet) that anyone can put funds into, later to be used for bidding on high-value NFT’s. This could be implemented for Royal the same way, and will be something like, creating a Music ETF of sorts, something that people could purchase a token for and receive exposure to all the tokenized music inside of that ETF.
Conclusion
There are many developments in the blockchain space that are happening daily. They are extremely hard to keep up with and stay informed because of the absolute lightning speed that these new developments happen.
Royal is a product that, in my opinion, will branch into many different ideas and uses from its original inception and release. The future of music is quickly becoming the present, and if we want to stay relevant as musicians, we will need to adopt and learn at a faster rate than blocks are mined.
(That is like 10–15 seconds)
Article Written by TUKYO
