Justin Blau, also known as 3LAU, a music producer and DJ, has formally announced the launch of Royal, a blockchain-based NFTs music investment platform. The platform is open to using different blockchain technologies.
According to Forbes, the announcement coincides with the platform obtaining $16 million in a seed funding round led by crypto-focused investment firm Paradigm and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Royal is a new platform founded by 3LAU and his college classmate JD Ross with the goal of enabling fractional music ownership using Royal’s own version of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, sometimes known as limited digital assets.
The venture aims to democratize access to music ownership for music fans by allowing them to invest in limited editions recorded on a blockchain network, as well as hold rights to their favourite songs and albums.
According to the project’s founders, this will allow fans to profit alongside their favourite musicians as their music becomes more popular.
3LAU and JD Ross have yet to decide which blockchain platform would serve as the foundation for the Royal platform, according to the article. The platform’s executives stated, “Royal is open to embracing other blockchain technologies.”
Royal will progressively roll out the platform in beta with limited access over the following six months, with a complete launch in the next eight to a year, according to Blau.
The business is already in talks with a number of well-known musicians to put them onto the site, though no names have been revealed thus far.
In the short term, Royal will charge artists a nominal fee, with the goal of making the initiative totally “community-run” in the future.
The new platform, according to 3LAU, is designed to help early music projects by allowing fans to invest in them.
“I always tell people that artists’ popularity is completely dependent on the fans and the listeners, not the companies and the distributors. If the fans like the music, they share it, they go to the shows, they’re fully responsible for augmenting an artist’s popularity,”
3LAU has been one of the most vocal cryptocurrency supporters in the music business, describing Bitcoin (BTC) as “one of the few hedges against a legacy, vacuous monetary system.”
The tokenized album Ultraviolet by 3LAU became the most valuable single NFT token ever sold in March. Several NFT auctions are said to have netted the artist more than $20 million in the last year.
