Bankless - Tokenizing Music with Royal | 3LAU (SotN 8/31)

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

DJ Justin '3LAU' Blau returns to Bankless to discuss Royal, the platform for decentralizing ownership to music rights. Royal recently raised $16m and has launched its early access. We've seen crypto take the visual art world by storm - is music next? ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/  🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/  🎖 CLAIM YOUR BADGE: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-guide-2-using-the-bankless-badge  ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum  🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha  🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger  🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants  ------ 📣 TracerDAO | Building DeFi Infrastructure. Join the Discord! https://bankless.cc/TracerDAO  ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:30 Justin Blau 9:24 Record Labels vs. Co-Ownership 15:55 Investing in Artists 21:24 Solving Hard Problems 25:42 Making Adoption Easier 28:21 Social Tokens 34:00 Stage & the Crowd 39:53 Tastemakers 43:05 Artistic Utopia 46:10 Permissionless 48:57 We're in the Future 51:02 DeFi, NFTs, and Culture 57:50 Closing & Disclaimers ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures 

Hey guys, welcome to another episode of State of the Nation. This is our opportunity to go over something big that is happening in crypto. David, I'm super excited about the conversation today. We have Justin Blow, DJ, producer, artist, influencer. We are talking about the concept of tokenizing music. We had Justin on in March. He said he was going to do this. He said he was going to find a way to tokenize music and add cash flows to music ownership. now he has. So that is going to be the conversation today. David, I'm excited about this one, man. There's so much to unearth in this conversation. The concept of music as an asset class, I think, blows people's brain. So that's really something I want to get into with Justin here, but also with the conversation of like what happens when the community behind an artist becomes an equal part of the value creation of artistic expression. Those are really the two things that I see unlocking with what Justin has released with his royal platform, which allows artists to tokenize music. Such a cool unlock for humanity. And I'm really bullish on the concept at large.

David, I got to ask you the question, man. What's the state of the nation today? Just because we always ask that question. State of the nation is vibing. Music, we vibe. There's this NFT, JPEG mania going on, which everyone is kind of vibing on. We got tokenized music coming. So tokenized vibes. Overall, state of the nation is viking. I'm feeling that vibe. Guys, a couple quick shoutouts before we get in. Go check out our friends at Tracer Dow. They have just linked, they've just released what they call a light paper. This is a D5 perpetual's product. It's going to be super cool. You can get involved in the Tracer Dow protocol as well. Link in the show notes. Also, quick public service announcement right after this conversation with Justin Blau,

David and I and Michael Wong from our team. We're going to be hanging out in Twitter Spaces. So this is the first time we've done this. We've messed around with the clubhouse in the past before. But if you were watching this live, come head to Twitter Spaces after the show. There's a link in the show notes. We'll also put it in the chat channel for you guys to join us. We'll talk about tokenizing music. Maybe we'll talk about the NFT craze. Talk about basically anything that you want in the bankless community, anything that's going on in crypto and just have some fun a little bit after. of this show. David, I think that's all we got, man. Should we get into sponsors and then to Justin Blow? Absolutely. And here we go. When you shop for plane tickets, you probably use kayak, Expedia, or Google to

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Coming out of that episode, he just had the biggest NFT sale ever. It's like $12 million for his ultraviolet album. He said, he told us at the time, he was working on the next big thing in tokenized music and NFTs. and that is a way to tokenize music rights, provide that to fans, provide a cash flow to fans for those music rights. He said he'd come back and tell us more about it. I think he's been pretty busy for the last four months or so working on that. And so he's back. That means there's good news. That means we have more stuff to talk about. Justin Blow, welcome back to Bankless, man. How you, how you been? Always good to be here. I'm a little bit under the weather, so forgive me if my energy

level is a bit low, but when it comes to NFTs and music tokenization, my, my energy levels rise no matter what. So here we are. Really stoked to tell you guys what I've been working on. We'll start there then. What have you been working on the past few months where we left things off? You were hyped on tokenized music, but there wasn't quite a solution out there to give access to fans to the cash flows, the rights, the royalty rights for that music. What progress have you made since then? what are you guys rolling out? Yeah, so I guess the best way to start is, you know, the way that NFTs introduced this new concept of digital ownership, right?

There are all these media files on the internet. Now you can own them. When it comes to something visual, whether it's video or image, it's pretty tangible, right? Like you being the official authenticated owner of this specific image is something that most people understand in the regular art world. But what does it mean to really own a song? was the question that I was kind of striving to really figure out over time. And my conclusion was, well, if the fans actually owned a piece of the song, then that NFT would be a lot more meaningful

than just owning a collectible song, right? Just something that is scarce and an audio file. So in my mind, everyone's always wanted to bet on their favorite artists early on, especially in music, right? Everyone loves sharing their music tastes, talking about the artists they found before they blew up, before they sold out, whatever it might be. And there's something really special in that. And that's kind of how all music was distributed for the past, you know, many centuries of time, right? Back in the classical era with Mozart to bands like Led Zeppelin, reputation and word of mouth is how popularity spread. There was no internet, right? Fast forward to now where you have an algorithm that kind of determines what's popular and what isn't, it's kind of hard to distinguish how much the fan is really, you know, benefiting from how much influence they have with the algorithm, repeating a song.

sharing it with their friends. All these activities are happening, but ultimately the fan is responsible for the popularity of an artist. Not the distributor, not the record label. No one. It's the fan. The fan who shares the music, right? So all these fans are contributing all this value to an artist's success, not participating in it whatsoever on the one hand. On the other hand, the artist can't even identify who any of their biggest fans are because platforms don't share the data. So I kind of have always envisioned this world where if I can at least identify who my biggest supporters are, I can engage them to spread the word about new music and to also hopefully win with me as those songs succeed. So the concept behind Royal, my new project, is why not give fans the ability to participate in

the upside of an artist success? And how do you do that leveraging NFT technology, leveraging, leveraging, you know, distributed ledger technology as a whole when it comes to distributing cash flows between lots of different people, right? So there have been a lot of people that have spoken about, you know, just bringing all of rights management to the blockchain, which we all know it's really hard to bridge the legacy world and the distributed world. It's just very, very difficult to do that in one fell swoop. So what we're doing at Royal is really just starting small and giving fans the ability to co-own music with their favorite artists with a new type of NFT that we're kind of pioneering. So let's go into that a little bit more. what does it mean to co-own music?

You've talked about like the historical association, but like when a fan just goes to Royal and they look up their favorite artists and they purchase a token, what does that unlock for them? What do they get? What's the product? So when you buy a song on iTunes before Spotify existed,

let's take a quick step back and then a step forward. You're really just buying a license to listen to something. You don't own the song. You don't own any rights, really, to the song. just the ability to listen. Same is true with Spotify when you pay for a membership, right?

But music has two types of rights associated with it. They have, you know, publishing rights and master recording rights. Publishing rights is the actual, like, writing of the song, the notes in sequence, the lyrics, all that stuff. And the master recording is the actual recording of the instruments, the digital audio, whatever that might be. And what we're doing at Royal is, you know, typically with the master recording,

that's what a label will, a record label, traditionally owns, right? So a record label will give an artist an offer and they'll say, hey, we're going to give you $100,000 today, but we're going to own 80% of your master recordings. Your master recording writes on this album forever. And the artist will say, okay, because $100,000 is a huge deal to them. In many ways, labels have acted as predatory, you know, basically venture funds for artists. That's kind of what labels are.

But they also promise other types of services like A&R services, you know, finding, finding vocalists, helping artists complete songs with different services, marketing, et cetera. What does it mean to own a piece of a song for a fan? The master recording, let's say the master recording represents 100% or sorry, the artist owns at the start 100% of the rights in that song before they sign it to a record label, before they do a deal with a distributor and so on and so forth. what we're doing is we're just saying, hey, what happens if we treat fans as collaborators and give them, you know, they buy this autographed edition of the song, an official edition of the song,

and in turn, they're a collaborator in the song, and they own 50 basis points of the master recording, right? And as royalties accrue to that song from Spotify, Apple Music, anything associated with the master recording, and that's a separate, you know, it could be stream only, It could be full master recording, which would include sinks. It's kind of totally up to the artist to decide, you know, what they want to give their fans.

But let's just assume it streams for a second. You know, every million streams on Spotify represents anywhere between three and $6,000. So if a song gets really, really popular and you own 50 basis points in that song forever, you'd accrue real cash flows to owning that song. And in many ways, the money that those fans might pay up front to the artist would probably be a way better deal than what record labels are offering. So we're trying to create a product that makes the playing field a lot more even for artists and also gives fans an opportunity to be more incentivized to really augment the popularity of a song because previously they would just share a song, fans and listeners would just share a song

if they like it. Now if they actually own a piece of it, how much harder are they going to go to support that artist? And just like everything else in the crypto ecosystem, aligning incentives is the key to a successful ecosystem in general. So this is just a new way of aligning incentives between artists and listeners. So I love the value proposition for fans and listeners, right? I can totally see this taking off in an absolutely massive way. But I haven't worked through putting myself in the shoes of an artist, say. So the traditional route is you go to a record label and think of that as kind of a VC firm.

The record label gives the artist money, provides a set of services, takes a cut, maybe a larger cut from the process. So that's like the old world model. What about raising funds and distributing via fans is better for the artist? Do you lose anything that the record label would provide? Maybe the record label has distribution and you have connections that the fans don't have.

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been an independent artist for most of my career. So I've run my own record label. It depends on the type of artist that you are. If you want to be a pop star, you're not a pop star yet, probably need a record label. If you have had some songs that have gone viral on TikTok, you probably don't need a record label to succeed.

It just depends on the size of an artist you want to be. I will say that we can also work with record labels. This is not an exclusive or mutually exclusive situation where you could be signed to a label, but still give fans a portion of whatever you maintain after you say. that deal, right? And now you just have an army of fans that are supporting you. So there's kind of an infinite number of combinations, but we definitely don't seek to replace the entire ecosystem that we think that might be a natural progression. We think in the short term, there's going to be a lot of hybrid situations for artists. What I'm curious about is, does this even for record labels

provide kind of some additional liquidity potentially that they couldn't get elsewhere, you know, through the fans? Based on the, like, to be completely honest, no. most record deals are like for a TikTok star who comes out with a song that's viral a lot of the time the record label will pledge 10K to take 80% of that song and that song will probably generate that 10K back in like four months. The artist just gets really excited by the money because they've never seen it before. They don't know that the song actually will generate income from streaming and they just sign the bottom line. That's like a typical situation. So I wouldn't say that there is more liquidity necessarily. Although like record labels, like overall there's a lot of liquidity from the record label ecosystem.

There are also a lot of, you know, let's forget listeners and fans, I as an artist would invest in other artists. I can't do that. Sure. Right? So there's a shit ton of liquidity in regular world, both crypto world and just, you know, lots of, you know, successful young people that want to earn income on their capital, music is an asset class that only private equity and hedge funds and record labels have even had access to. So a big part of Royal is democratizing access to music as an asset class. When you step back and look at it and zoom out, it's kind of weird

that you can't invest in an artist. You can't invest in. And this has been kind of the pattern, right? Like for everything. It's kind of weird that it was really hard. It's really hard to invest in crypto for a very long time. It was hard. A lot of barriers to entry. It was really hard for a regular person to buy stocks. Robin Hood made it a lot easier, right? Like access to certain types of asset classes has been a huge wave where you have all this new technology that's just making it easier for the public to get access to these things. And music and not even just music, but this of course extends to all creative content. It's just something that people haven't been able to invest in yet has been producing enormous cash flows. the way, has only been doing so for a short period of time.

Like, streaming cash flows have only been around, I mean, five to ten years at best, in terms of like real income. My income in 2015, my income in 2021 from streaming is 50 plus X what it was in 2015, right? Granted, I came out with a lot of new songs in between then, but even like the one, like a couple of the songs, if we just excluded all the new stuff, it would probably still be 30, 40x because of streaming. And there's this misconception in the public narrative that, like, streaming services don't pay artists. Everyone's heard that before. Artists don't get paid. Artists don't get paid. No, no, no. They do. It's just there's someone in the middle taking a giant

cut before they do. That's what's really happening. So we just seek to kind of rebalance that. And we see this pattern in crypto all the time. That is the crypto pattern. Let's take a central intermediary and let's give that rights to the people, to the community that care about the relevant, you know, asset that is represented, right? And so this just fits into line with all the other patterns that we've seen in this industry before. Let's take a middleman. Let's automate that away. Let's integrate a sort of, you know, digital asset on Ethereum. And then let's democratize access to the people that want it the most, which is the market, right? And so it's take it, it's unleashing, an entire marketplace that was previously cornered or captured by record labels.

Is all of these characterizations correct? Yeah, no, 100%. And that's not to say record labels will always be around. They do add value in certain ways. It's just there's no competitors, right? So record labels, you know, if Royal is successful, record labels will just be forced to be more competitive in their deal structures. There are a lot of artists that do need the marketing services of labels.

There are artists that do need, you know, the production and music specific services from record labels. There are also a lot of artists that don't need them at all, me being one of them, right? I have worked with some great record labels that have done a lot for my music, and I love those labels, but a lot of those deals are more fair

than a typical label deal because I'm involved in the negotiation, right? The problem is that a lot of artists just don't even know their own worth. And what I think the NFT movement has really produced is it's shown creatives that they are worth something, that all the advertising revenue that platforms have been generating off their backs means they're worth something. And they're starting to see it and really take control.

The other common theme that I'm saying with this is that in crypto, the ability to exit is such an important right that makes a lot of game theory about crypto things alive. Like the ability to exit out of a system if that system is punishing you and you can just say, well, I'm going to leave. That's a game theoretically sound property that we see in crypto all the time. And so now what I'm seeing with Royal is Royal is offering this platform that allows artists to, maybe after they get a name for themselves, you talked about how you don't really think that maybe up-and-coming artists that haven't really established a brand or community for themselves. Maybe this isn't the right product for them. But as soon as they do, they can move and migrate their

community and their attention to Royal and quote-unquote exit from a cornered market. and allow a much more expression of value by the community directly to the creator. And so the relationship is established between community and creator and allows the community to rally behind something. And also, like I said, allows the artist to opt into a different form of financialization for themselves. Exactly. And it's worth mentioning in the short term with Royal, the products that are going to be

available are finished products. It's like a very important distinction. You as an artist won't be able to come on Royal and raise money for your next album. That's not something that we can do yet. And that's what record labels can do, correct? Sorry? And that's what record labels can do, right?

That's kind of a perk of a record label. Okay. Well, and by the way, we can do that. It just requires a slightly different setup that's going to take us a little bit longer to build from a compliance standpoint. But from a pretty simple standpoint, if a song is complete,

and either about to come out or out, there's no reason why other people can't own a piece of it. And we're going to be doing some really cool things with all my existing NFTs as well, where I'm definitely going to be doing some retroactive rewards for all my existing holders and, you know, for specific songs and whatnot. And we'll hopefully be announcing that in the next couple weeks. Can I ask you, wow, like, why has no one done this before? Or another way to ask that question. Yeah.

Yeah, so like what unique problems does you guys have to solve? Like, is it, you mentioned compliance already? Is it all compliance? Is it technology? So there's kind of, yeah, I mean, a lot of the problems, I don't want to dive too deep into on a public podcast, right? But I think that there's the actual scalability of the tech, ETH Mainnet, is going to be really hard to scale this on ETH Mainnet for, lots of artists and lots of fans, right? Like it's inevitable. So L2 kind of feels like it's a necessity,

especially when it comes to distributing cash flows on a regular basis, the cost of that, right, to lots of different addresses. Some L2 or EVM-compatible blockchain is probably a better choice as this scales. Like, just impot shit. You can only mint like, what is it, like 33 NFTs per block or something like that or otherwise you use up the block-ass limit. So it's like, you know, almost impossible to think about like royalty distribution at scale on main net anytime soon. So that's like a big technological challenge that we're definitely overcoming. But there's a lot of like smart contract architecture that needed to be built that also needs to be secure to make this all work on chain.

And then of course there needs to be a bridge from the off chain world to get all this money that's being generated by streaming services and bringing that on chain. That's a whole other, that's another piece of it. right. But the biggest challenge is definitely regulatory. I mean, we've seen what's happening in Congress and how much debate there is surrounding like the infrastructure bill and all this stuff, right? And so the uncertainty there requires us to be extra diligent and work with true experts on the legal side, which we've been doing for the past four months. And we wouldn't have set forth on this journey would we have thought we couldn't do this, right? We definitely know it's possible. It just requires a lot of meticulous planning and carefulness. And, you know, I think that's

our biggest challenge. Just like riding that line well. Is that a challenge in the U.S. primarily, wow? Or is it like, are you guys looking at rolling yourself? It's everywhere. It's not, it's not the same kind of challenges as a token sale challenge. It's quite a bit different. There's like, there's a lot of variables there that we don't need to dive into that I'd rather not type do on this on the podcast but um we are working with like incredible experts on it and and i think that you know the reality is um songs today you can you can buy trade and own ownership in songs with a lot of services off chain today anyone can go do that right so bringing it on chain shouldn't really trigger anything we just have to make sure we're doing all that perfectly so what what parts

of like this the legal restriction has actually like limited the scope of what uh royal can do Like if you guys were able to take off the leash, like, what could you do if you could use your imagination? The number one thing that we want to do and we still think we can do in the future is have an artist, you know, a promising new artist, raise money to complete a future album, which by definition is definitely, you know, has to require certain compliance mechanisms. And we want to enable that. But just like anything else, you know, there are lots of things that are securities at one point that aren't later. There are lots of things that aren't securities that become securities, right? It's just a matter of what the disclosures are, what the marketing efforts are and stuff like that.

So we're keeping things really, really simple at first and making sure we're doing everything, crossing T's dotting eyes and all that. But the reality is it's a gray area. No one really has answers. We've spoken to everyone, literally everyone, and no one has answers. So, you know, it's going to be fun. It's going to be a challenging. But to your question, Ryan, it's, you know, why hasn't someone else done this before? It's just hard getting artist traction, getting a lot of, you know, people to believe in this future is difficult.

But now is the time. This is definitely the best time. Can I ask about traction? Wow. So, like, I'm just wondering how the more, it's felt like in 2021, crypto has for the first time maybe started to enter more mainstream consciousness for something other than Bitcoin, right? Like, NFTs made Saturday Night Live, you know, in Q1, right?

And now we're in the thick of an NFT mania where millions of dollars are being made, artists are connecting directly with fans. And I'm wondering if this makes the conversation. with the artists you talk to easier, or does it make it harder? Are they now able to see the vision of what you're talking about in a bigger way? Yeah? So, like, what are the, tell us about some of the conversations. Four years ago, four years ago, I would talk about this stuff.

There's still this video of me talking about NFTs on Fox Business News from 2018. And I will cherish that video clip forever. When I start talking about NFTs and the anchor, the anchor is just like, oh, that sounds interesting and then moves on. But back then it was really hard to get people to understand. Now, inevitably, you know, speculation and financial explosion excites people, gets them to dive a little bit deeper in the technology, and then they actually begin to understand the potential.

And that's where we are in the cycle, where every major musician has been thinking about an NFT strategy. they want to do it the right. There are a lot of people that we're talking to that don't want to just release collectibles. They want to do it the right way. They want to do it a special way, right? Just releasing a collectible song isn't interesting enough

the same way just releasing a collectible visual kind of works in that own world, right? You take some of these projects like, you know, or at APO Club or any of the Larva Labs projects where there's this strong emphasis on community. it's really hard to do that with just audio, right? And that's one of the biggest goals for Royal is how do we build a community around ownership of music, which is one of the biggest cultural objects, cultural forces that has existed in, like, humanity. Right?

Music is a cultural force. So, you know, now all these artists are really starting to see that this is the future. Some are being hasty, just going through the front door and trying to sell stuff for a stupid, an amount of money and others are taking a lot more time to think about how do we reward the people who have supported us. And those are the artists that I think will succeed in the space. Do you think of when you're talking to artists about this and these types of conversations as royal in the whole concept of tokenizing their music, is that sort of one tool in the tool belt of how they might approach building their digital community? Are there other things as well

that accompany this, right? So like the idea of social tokens, for example, or the idea of art-centered NFTs. I'm a little bit of geriatric on social tokens. I think that there's a lot of power in a fungible social token. A lot of that power hasn't been unlocked yet. I think board apes have shown that being a part of a, of a larger community of non-fungible holders

operates in a lot of the same ways a social token might operate. You know, it's just a technical distinction and a functional distinction. I do think that there are places for fungible tokens within non-fungible ecosystems, like imagine owning an NFT that has consumable, fungible tokens associated with it.

So, you know, if you own this, you can redeem an aspect of it up to five times a year or something like that, right? Like there's there and then you could even trade those fungible tokens that maybe you get alongside an NFT purchase, kind of the way that hash masks did it with the name change tokens and the NFTs, right? Like there's there's inevitably going to be a whole ecosystem built around this stuff. And ultimately it's up to the like it's not up to me to say what works and what doesn't

work. It's up to the creator, right? It's up to the creator to figure out how they want to structure their own ecosystem. And we just want Royal to be one of those tools. you know, it's not going to be, like, Royal token, Royal is not going to be a social token platform, right? I can be very explicit in saying that. It's going to very specifically be a way for people to collect and own music

and share ownership of that music with artists. That being said, you know, we hope that artists that want to kind of take the next step with social tokens, with Tao, you know, with Daos, like we would love to see a world where an individual owns a lot of songs on Royal, and then creates a DAO surrounding that ownership. Like, why not? We'd love to see something like that happen. We may even support some of that functionality in the future.

But, you know, I've always loved the idea of, like, a DAO for music tastes, right? Like, you just have this DAO collect a bunch of amazing ownership in different songs, and that's probably really expensive for one person to own, right? And that's really powerful. But we have to be very mindful of what we do as royal and what we want our users to do and to build off of post, you know, their first purchase overall. Do you think a bloudao could do quite well. Bloudau.

Oh, my God. What a name. Bladdao. Justin, I actually think that like, we have a lot of like, you know, big imaginations in the space and we have all these different like classifications of tokens. I actually think social tokens are kind of really any sort of token that helps bring a community together, right? And so to some degree, like if there is a bunch of like black

music tokens and they're all distributing royalties to all the listeners. And as a result of that, all of these like, like-minded people all show up in the same discord and talk about all their blau tokens. Then it's a social token, right? Totally agree. It's more of just like an emergent property of what happens when communities arrive. And so there's two points of conversation that I tease in the beginning and I want to get to. And those are the changing relationship between fans and artists as a result of the instantiation of a token, as well as the concept of like trading music, music, like trading music genres, like going long, rock and roll and going short on country. I've always wanted to short country music. And so I want to get

to those conversations and I don't want to interrupt that conversation when we have it. So I'm going to interrupt this conversation right now with our second round of sponsors so we can have a more seamless conversation in just a second. So here we go. Living a bankless life requires taking control of your own private keys, not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bank Nation already have their ledger hardware wallets, which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the ledger ecosystem is more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite D-Apps all in one place, Ledger is where you want to

be. Not only does Ledger let you buy crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into decentralized exchange aggregators like Pereswap, which makes sure that you are getting the best prices on your trades without your assets ever leaving your control. Defi never stops growing and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it. So click the link in the show notes to see all the Defy apps that Ledger Live has and stay tuned as more and more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab your ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your D-Apps all in one place. Bankless is proud to be supported by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are

matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum, which is what Ryan and I call a money robot. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. Something brand new in the Uniswop ecosystem is the Uniswap Grants program is now accepting applications for grants. We have been saying this for a while and we'll say it again. Dows have money and they are in need of labor. If you think that you have something to contribute to the Uniswap Dow, apply for a grant to Uniswap. Just look at the size of the Uniswap treasury. It's almost $3 billion. This mountain of capital is looking for labor. Do you have something

of value to contribute to the Uniswap Dow? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a UniGrant at Unigrants.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. exactly what we did to get Uniswap to be a sponsor for Bankless, and you can do the same for your project. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring bankless. All right, guys, we are back with Justin Blow for the second half of this conversation, which I think we're going to open up our imaginations and look into the future, into a world where Royal is maximally successful. There's tons of tokens everywhere. There's tons of artists who are tokenizing their songs. And I want to start this conversation with how

this changes the relationship between an artist's community and the artist themselves. And I have this section titled, It Takes Two to Tango, because previously we would have the artist make the value and then we would have the fan base consume that value and be like, yay, and then follow you on Twitter. And that would be the end of the relationship, right? Now we actually have a vehicle, which is the token, for the fans to do their own thing with the token and actually return value back into the ecosystem. So now it's no longer artists on the stage with fans in the crowd, but it's artists on stage with the fans on their own. stage because they have this empowerment of a token. I'm going to use that. The fans have their own stage.

Fans have their own stage. I'm using that. That's really good. No, that's why you come on a bank list so we can help spin memes. And so like Justin, when you imagine this in the future, like how does the actualization of a community around the fan or around the artist change music and music culture? So the number one reason why I'm personally insanely. excited about what we're doing at Royal is the difference in my life and my relationship with

my community, how just issuing regular NFTs, I shouldn't say regular audiovisual NFTs since last year, has completely changed my relationship with the group of people that have collected and purchased them, right, in a way that I've never had a relationship with my fans before. I can post to social media, but it's very much a one-way street of just like, hey, here's what I'm doing and fans being like, oh, that's cool. Now I have a Discord community with thousands of people that I talk to on a daily basis. And I wouldn't have even stumbled upon that had I not started issuing NFTs and building a community surrounding that ownership. So when you start to scale that, every artist has time to talk to the people that listen to their music, maybe not everyone, but definitely

the people who are their biggest supporters. And artists definitely have time to reward those biggest supporters, and those biggest supporters are the most powerful distributors more than anything else. Like the people that go around and share a new song with all their friends, that has an insane domino ripple effect across all other potential listeners and fans of that artist. But the incentives just haven't been there, right? They're not on a stage. They're in the crowd. They're one of the crowd.

Now, when you kind of gamify fandom, and that's like, maybe, be an extreme way of saying it. I hate the word fan because it's kind of demeaning. I much prefer the word like supporter or listener, right? If you give supporters and listeners the ability to achieve success by supporting you, it just creates this symbiosis that hasn't existed in the creative content world ever, right? And so what does this mean for the future? I mean, I think people will have portfolios of songs the way they have portfolios of stocks, you know, the way they have portfolios of sneakers and trading cards today, right? Like the behavior is innate in humans, right? We love to collect things. But what does it mean to collect music? Well, it used to mean collecting

vials and CDs. Now it's a playlist, but it doesn't feel like you own it the same way you actually own the trading card or you own the sneaker or you own the cryptocurrency, right? So what Royal seeks to do is it seeks to redefine the definition of music ownership, where there is a certain percentage of a song that is owned, typically just by an artist and record label, we want to expand that ownership to everyone. And it's as simple as that. And then what happens all the different mechanics that we're talking about? Yeah.

And you talked about like the changing role of the community as like, you know, the supporters and the distributors. Well, that was previously the role of the record. record labels, right? And so, like, the same role exists. Like, that still is a necessary part of the music creation and process. But now that responsibility is in the hands of the community, which those, and that community is self-selected, right? Like, if you are an artist, you have to go to a record label and like, hey, please sign me. Or you also alternately have a community who's like, hey, we will distribute for you. And so you are actually, like, finding the people that are most aligned with

your music to do your labor for you. And once again, the fundamental pattern of all things, things crypto or just the world at large is like finding alignment and allowing and creating technologies to create that alignment. Yeah, and these things can coexist, right? Like record labels are still necessary for a lot of different types of artists, but there are also a lot of artists that do everything themselves, myself included. Like, you know, I come up with our own marketing plans, with music video treatments, but all that stuff, right?

And there are a lot of those out there. And so it's just providing another tool in the toolkit for everyone. I want to turn the conversation to the changing role of a tastemaker when it comes to music. There's people out there, perhaps people that are professional music consumers who, and they're also like cultural people that just kind of dictate, I mean, people listen to to like, you know, what is good music? What is good food? There are these tastemakers of these, of the world out there that actually like, you know, their kind of role in responsibility is to, you know, pick taste and tell society like, hey, like, we like this thing now. How does, how does,

How does the role of tastemaker change when we have a royal enabled world? Tastemakers are now rewarded for actually having good taste. That's what I think is so powerful. Music and even DJing is all about taste. It's about even making a song requires taste to combine all these different sounds into a final package that someone else might like at the end of the day. Maybe they don't like it, maybe they do. but being a taste maker is a very big part of what's happening in the NFT ecosystem, right?

And there's no reason why that shouldn't happen in other creative fields outside of just visuals, right? Like the NFT space is very visual oriented and gaming oriented. Those two sectors, like art and gaming, have taken off in massive ways. You've crazy success with AXI, you know, crazy success with projects like board apes, you know, artists like people, Slime Sunday, music has yet to kind of take off because it hasn't really been defined

as a part of the ecosystem. So, you know, we hope to kind of create that standard that the community respects and likes. And once that standard is kind of established, the, you know, musicians can start to take advantage of the technology as well. And there have been a lot of frustrated musicians

who are like, I want to get into NFTs, but I don't know how, because all I can do is pair up with a, visual artist and put a song behind this thing. And I'm like, just wait a little bit. We'll have the right tools for you that, you know, highlight the music itself. I think that's really important. The instantiation of fundamentals as good music behind these tokens, I think is really, really important. Like, in the NFT world or the, you know, the JPEG NFT world, people joke. The fundamentals behind these things are like, are they cute or not? Or like, do they look good or not? And now, and now

we actually get to instantiate like, does this music sound good? And if it does, the token will go up in value, right? Like, unlocking that is, I think the cool thing about it is going to direct humanity towards good music faster than we've ever been able to go to before, because we've unleashed the power of markets behind these things. Exactly. The same way prediction markets have been really great predictors. People put their money behind their beliefs. There hasn't really been a way to do that at all in the creative space in music specifically. I think it'll also be the case that we'll get all sorts of new music and all sorts of artists to enter the space who previously haven't been able to enter it.

And I'm curious, Blau, if you think, like, let's, let's fast forward. Let's say Royal is successful. And it's not just Royal, but like an entire defy music, tokenized music industry is birthed off the back of what some of you guys are doing as standard bears. So what does this world look like? Is there some kind of like web interface, defy interface where we have like a Aztec for music? And as David was saying, you could collateralize music ownership. You could you could collateralize music ownership. You can value that collateral way better than valuing like just a visual NFT, right, because there is a cash flow. And so establishing, like, because there is a cash flow

and there's a way to estimate those cash flows. I mean, there's, there's an entire market surrounding creative assets that, like I said before, hedge funds and PE shops have had access to. And hedge funds and PE shops view these assets as like inflation protected cash flow producing assets. The same way they used to view real estate, like multifamily commercial. You know, these are just and these assets are new because they haven't been cash flow producing because we've only been paying for streaming subscription memberships for less than a decade, right? It hasn't been that long since these kinds of cash flows have even existed. So, yes, I mean, outside of Royal, there's going to be inevitably in the next two decades, an entire ecosystem, like an entire financial on-chain ecosystem for creative assets. And we just know that that's inevitable.

Part of the reason why I started Royal, knowing that it was going to be a huge challenge, because it's definitely the time to start it right now, but it is still a little bit early at the same time, right? There's mass attention towards NFTs, but the tech isn't 100% scalable in there yet, right? The big reason why I wanted to start Royal was because I was speaking to one of our lead investors at Paradigm, Fred Erzum,

and he asked, he was like, if somebody else does this, will you regret it? Yeah, I would. If I wasn't the one to do this and someone else did, I would regret it for the rest of my life. And that's what I knew that I had to take the deep dive and take on the challenge. Because it is a challenge.

We have a team of 10 people that have been working nonstop to build this thing. And it started out with just JD and I in the first month. And JD is one of my best friends from college. He started a company, called Open Door that's now a $10 billion publicly traded company. And one of the founders on Open Door with Keith, who's one of our investors. So all like within the family, all friends.

And there's no way I could accomplish this without JD, who has so much experience building companies and hiring. And we've just been on a role bringing on expert team members from, we've got Derek, Dan, Scott, Abby, and a bunch of new team members coming on. And we're just cranking. So, you know, trying to make this thing happen as fast as possible. Here's a technical question that I forgot to ask in the first half of the show. Are these music royal tokens?

Are they whitelisted or do they, are they permissionless? You can like list them on any exchange and any Ethereum mattress can purchase them. Initially, they'll be locked. Okay. They will be withdrawable for a little bit. And then eventually, yes, they'll be permissionless. Okay. So that's such a-

And it's also up to the artist to actually like account to their fans. and that's a whole other conversation. Right. Yeah, that doesn't sound very fun. We'll leave that for the documentation. Yeah. We're going to guide that process initially. Okay, so the ability for these things to be completely non-whitelisted and open is it offers such a compelling, like, money Lego.

And that's how, like, music actually comes and be as a service is its own like money Lego to the rest of Defi, right? Because if you have like all of these rock artists, then something like the index co-op can make a rock index. Right? And we won't do that, but we won't stop other people from doing that. Right. Yeah. So that's actually where I was leading to. It's like, where do you guys see yourself as, as like, do you guys, are you guys just the token issuance entity? Or are you guys thinking about like facilitating any sort of like financial services? Definitely. Yeah. We definitely don't want to facilitate any sort of financial services in the short term. That's where things get complicated. But we know we don't want to stop other people from doing that. Right. And, and, we definitely don't want to stop other people from doing that. Right. And, and, We want to support it however we can, as long as those activities are legal and reasonable. But yeah, why not? Somebody creates a country ETF that's backed by real ownership in country songs.

It's going to be a while before we get there, right? It's going to be probably years, to be completely honest, because we're just not going to have the supply of content for that to happen, for that to be a really liquid thing. But we will have a lot of supply. It's just like, how do you really get exposure to the entire, world of country music, well, you kind of need a bunch, you need a lot, right? The same way, you know, that's why it takes, that's why it's taking so long for like a Bitcoin

ETF to even get approved, right? Right. So, you know, there's, there's a lot there, but we would love for people to be able to, you know, bet on the success of genres beyond artists. And this is just step one. We have one common theme that we've seen about Ethereum is that it tries to suck up all capital that it can. If there's capital, Ethereum wants it. And I would expect, like, as soon as there's any meaningful amount of, like, royal tokens on there, like, it's, these things are going to find their ways into the corners of D5, right? They will find their ways into the Metaverse Index. An index will find its way to be collateral inside of applications. And all of a sudden, like,

there's going to be this insatiable hunger for more of these tokens. And so, like, the bottleneck is going to come from, like, how fast Royal can actually, like, onboard artists and issue tokens. Do you guys have like a strategy? What's your guys a strategy with that? So the first couple months is really just a product rollout. We have a bunch of beta tests, just making sure it all works, right? And then we have a pipeline of people that are interested since we made the announcement. We've had a stupid amount of user signups, a stupid amount of artist requests. And eventually we want to open the platform completely. But that's going to take some time. It's definitely, you know, bringing in the cash flow component changes a lot of

things, right? If we were just tokenizing music itself as collectible music, that would be a totally different story. It would be way easier to scale quickly, but we really do want to create meaning behind the ownership. Do you know the reason I think this is so inevitable about is because I can't think of any fan supporter who doesn't want this, and I can't think of any artist out there who doesn't want this as an option. Do you know, it's just like... And that's been the feedback. That's been the feedback. It's been the feedback. This is what the market wants, right? So if you guys can find a way to thread the needle from a technology perspective,

from a compliance perspective, then this just seems so inevitable. And yeah, you're early. But, like, we very much believe in the tokenization of everything, the financialization of everything. Like, we've seen it, not just in our lifetimes, like, since the time we entered crypto in the last few years, how much, like, how this industry has moved leaps and bounds. Yeah, defy was birth. Like, I wasn't using Ethereum every day.

Now I am, right? You're an addict. You know, like, that's the thing is, that's what's changed. The technology is actually becoming part of the fabric of people's everyday lives. Whereas before it was very much, this is the future. Now it's now and the future, right? And that's really exciting. Yeah, this is huge.

And so we're super excited for you. I got to ask you as we start to wrap up here at Blau. I'm curious what you're doing. in defy these days. So it's like you're on Ethereum every day. You mess around with NFT? Compoundave. Compoundave.

Okay, keeping it simple. Bumer Dufi. Bhrie. Bifai. Hey, that's me. But, you know, just, there's a lot of risk. I've dabbled in riskier,

you know, riskier pools a lot in the past. But because I'm so focused on Royal, I've honestly like, I've lost a little bit of my pulse on what's happening in like regular NFT world because I'm so, so focused on one thing.

Still, like, was around for the mutant ape drop. Thanks. Thanks for my friends tipping me off. But I'm definitely, like, so focused on one thing that I've lost a little bit of, like, what you guys are studying on a daily basis. So it's always fun to hear, like, what are you guys excited about right now? What's happening in the back end that really gets you pumped? I know I'm excited about fractional.

I think fractional is a really cool project. What are the things you guys are thinking about? I'm particularly excited exactly what you just said. The intersection between defy and NFTs, as we were talking, Paradigm, just released a new paper, I think, which I'm about to go read about perpetuals that are based off of floor prices. So, like, you can just basically get leverage against the floor of an NFT project. So that's pretty cool. There's also the... I haven't read that.

It happened while we were alive. I just saw the notification on my phone. Your investors are pretty smart. Yeah. Your investors are pretty smart. They're okay. Honestly, paradigm. Both paradigm and Founders Fun, like, have been absolutely insanely helpful.

And we actually, we should probably be leveraging them more. They're some of the smartest people that I've met in my life. We're honored to have them. If Fred Erison ever wants to come on the show, you let him know, we got a spot for him. We're just texting a second ago. I'll tell them to watch the podcast. Okay, sounds good. Wow, I'm curious about this.

Like, just to end this and wrap things up. So, David and I, we are, like, looking at this every day. but I feel like we are so immersed in crypto culture that, at least for me, I don't get a chance to see what mainstream's reaction to it is, like what other cultures reaction to crypto is. How do you think crypto culture is going to impact broader culture as a whole? Are you seeing it seep into other areas yet? Yeah, this is the first time. I think that NFTs are the instrument of that, to be completely honest.

I have friends asking me, how do I buy a squiggle? And I'm like, who, here we go. Like, I can't afford a punk or an ape, but like squiggles sound cool. And most of them are just speculating the same thing that happened during the ICU boom. The difference is, here's what I would say is different about the NFT explosion and the ICU boom.

The ICU boom was purely driven by, speculative desire to make money and off the back of ideas that were really promising. Some of those ideas failed, others succeeded. With NFTs, the second you buy something, even though your original intention might be speculative, you become a part of this digital identity movement that you just feel. So you have this other variable with NFTs as compared to the other money legos of crypto that is identity based and emotional based. And I think that's what's making it stick so hard. If I could explain it why it's different this time, let's not to say that there might not be a giant burst in prices.

Like totally could happen. But for people like myself, you know, my crypto punk is worth a lot more than I paid for it. But I don't even care. I love my crypto punk paper gains up paper gains down doesn't matter if if that was another I'll be completely honest though like if I as someone who studied finance and I don't I don't actively trade I trade over the longer periods of time if I had made an investment in something like if I invested in Solano which is obviously performed extremely well I would definitely take gains on that investment right but with an NFT you're selling all of it or none of it and that's like

hard it's hard to do because it's a part of your identity Right. And so I think people are buying in and they're holding more than they might a regular cryptocurrency because they actually feel something towards the asset that they own. And I gifted my little brother a mutant ape yesterday. And it's worth a lot. You don't want to sell it because it's so cool. Right. And like people are just starting to get across the bridge. They're coming across the moat. They're starting to feel and see that it's not. right-click save world, it's social signaling. The same way the Instagram verification checkmark is a social signal. Owning a crypto punk today, I mean, Jay-Z changes his profile picture to a crypto punk, Visa bought a crypto punk. A crypto punk is cooler than a Ferrari. Just saying.

Like, it's cooler than a Lambo. It's cooler than a Bugatti. Because your Bugatti's in your garage and not everyone in the world is going to see you driving it all the time. But everyone's going to see your fucking million dollar profile picture. So that's the world that we're going to live in, an enhanced digital community. It's inevitable. I don't know if, you know, I don't know if we curse on bankless, but it's absolutely inevitable.

And the more, you know, mainstream culture dips in, the more people from the outside tech community, will come and build a better crypto universe. I think that's what I'm most excited about is there aren't that many engineers. There aren't that many Rust engineers. There aren't that many solidity devs relative to all the developers in the world. And you have all these people from all walks of life joining the crypto community because they see the potential. In fact, most of our employees are not crypto-native, but they figure it out real quick right now. And so it's amazing to see to watch, you know, our head PM, Scott, who didn't know anything about crypto or maybe knew a little bit about crypto before, you know, joining Royal is now an expert on the benefits of optimistic role, of ZK. Roel. Like he knows everything, you know, just because he's really smart. And I think that I think that's what's so powerful about the movement is it's bringing in the brightest minds to build a better world within the decentralized world. And that's what's happening now and that's accelerating at rapid.

speed. Well said, Blow, we'll end it there. But so many people, I would say, are falling down the rabbit hole with NFTs as we speak. And they're never coming out. This is like a one-way bridge. They're in crypto for life. Justin Blow, thanks for all your work. Thanks for carrying the torch into the tokenizing the music industry. We appreciate you coming on bankless once again. Thanks, guys. Always a pleasure. Bankless Nation, risks and disclaimers. Of course. ETH is risky, crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Quick reminder, we are having a Twitter space conversation right after this episode. So join us there,

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