Royal, which wants to help musicians create and sell NFTs, share royalties with fans, and more, raises $55M, following a $16M seed in August
Top celebrities and musicians have joined a $55 million fundraise in the up-and-coming NFT music platform Royal. Tweets: @jeffjohnroberts Tweets: Jeff Roberts / @jeffjohnroberts : Musicians using NFTs to share royalties with fans is an intriguing use of blockchain—and a new frontier in copyright law. I spoke with DJ @3LAU about how it works: https://decrypt.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Royal has moved fast from launch to scale: DJ 3LAU's $16M seed round in August, led by Founders Fund and Paradigm, backed a platform that lets users trade shares of song royalty rights as crypto tokens. Three months later it has closed a $55M Series A led by a16z, with top celebrities and musicians joining the round.
The raise lands amid a broader re-pricing of music rights: Kobalt Capital built a $600M fund to buy copyrights outright, and NFT music sales had already reached $42.5M by early 2021. Coverage of Royal argues the model could upend predatory record deals by shifting power from labels to artists and fans.
First-order effects
- Royal gets the capital to scale its royalty-sharing NFT marketplace beyond its initial artist roster, with celebrity participants lending distribution and credibility to the tokenized-royalty model.
- a16z doubles down on the category it knows: the same firm later leads Sound's $20M Series A for NFT song minting, making it the dominant backer of fan-facing music NFT platforms.
Second-order effects
- Labels and legacy deal structures face a competing route to market where fans, not advance-writing labels, fund releases — pressuring the economics of traditional recording contracts.
- Institutional royalty buyers like Kobalt now share the asset class with retail fans, splitting music-rights ownership between funds buying whole catalogs and platforms selling fractional slices.
Third-order effects
- If fan-held royalty tokens proliferate, copyright law and securities regulation become the binding constraints: as Jeff Roberts notes, sharing royalties with fans is 'a new frontier in copyright law,' and fractional revenue streams edge toward regulated financial instruments.
- The longer-term structure points toward artists routing around label advances entirely, with platforms like Royal and Sound becoming the new intermediaries that set terms, take rates, and custody of royalty flows.
The trend: Music royalties are being tokenized into fan-tradable assets, with a16z-backed platforms like Royal and Sound racing to replace label financing as the default way artists monetize their catalogs.