Revelator and Family in Music First to Pay Artists Streaming Royalties in 24 Hours via Artist Wallet

Revelator has run another successful pilot of its new blockchain-based Original Works platform with trusted client Family in Music, a Finland-based artist services company supporting significant independent music. Revelator and Family in Music together tested Original Works’ Artist Wallet daily royalty payout feature, paying artists for the first time ever in a mere 24 hours.

The Artist Wallet is the hub of Original Works platform, the most robust decentralized music rights management protocol ever. Using the Wallet as a virtual home base, artists and labels can monitor their usage data, set up automated song splits, arrange daily royalty settlements, and soon receive micro-advances, as easily as they’d post to social media. Family in Music invited around 20 creators to use the Wallet, first for song split management and then for daily royalty settlements, as opposed to the quarterly or longer settlement periods typical in the industry.

This pilot helps prove that blockchain-based music rights administration is not only possible, but stands to benefit artists in clear ways. It builds on several other highly successful tests of the technology with major global publishers and with Finnish CMO Teosto and music usage tracking experts BMAT, providing royalties to songwriters and publishers. This pilot used one smart contract per release to ensure money flowed into the Artist Wallet in a couple of minutes, with fees lower than what traditional structures charge for royalty collection.

“In the music blockchain world, you get some people who are very fresh faced and full of energy with romantic views that don’t add up to viability,” explains Kevin Bacon, Family in Music’s Chief Innovation Officer. “In publishing, for example, there is a manifold of things to solve and it soon becomes so complex that a simple tokenized system doesn’t work. It’s all the years and background work, the power hours that the Revelator team have put into this, that makes Revelator the only viable platform of its kind because it stands on bigger pillars and a firmer foundation.  No one else in the world is really doing it, not to professional standards.”

“Our past pilots focused on CMOs, but this is our first proof of how well this system can work for artists. These real-life stress tests are essential to progressing decentralized tools for an industry that desperately needs better and faster ways to pay for rights usage and to manage valuable digital assets,” says Bruno Guez, founder and CEO of Revelator. This is the first successful use case of daily royalty payments made directly to artists using blockchain.  “The Artist Wallet is the cornerstone of what we hope will be a new approach that will increase efficiency and ultimately improve artists’ lives. There are many visions floating around for blockchain or other decentralized solutions for the music industry’s woes, but none that actually exist and work and pay artists–until now.”