RoyaltyChain

Streaming rebuilt the music industry. The payment plumbing didn't change.

Recorded music revenue fell for 15 years, then streaming brought it back to a record. In 2025, Spotify alone paid the music industry more than $11 billion. Getting that money to the right people is where the system breaks.

One stream triggers three royalties

A song carries two copyrights: the composition (lyrics and melody, owned by the songwriter and publisher) and the master recording (usually owned by the label). Each one pays out through its own organizations, and none of these pipelines talk to each other.

Where the money gets stuck

The black box

Royalties nobody can match to an owner pile up. In the US, streaming services handed $424 million of them to the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC). If the MLC can't match them within two years, it can hand the rest to publishers by market share, so the money goes to the biggest publishers instead of the people who wrote the songs. Independent songwriters, who can't register in every system, lose the most.

One shared, tamper-proof record of who owns every song

RoyaltyChain doesn't replace Spotify, Apple Music or any other platform. It replaces the ownership database underneath them, the layer where today's disputes and delays start.

Why a permissioned chain, not Ethereum

Royalties are a regulated financial flow full of confidential contracts, so a public chain is ruled out. RoyaltyChain runs on Hyperledger Fabric.

Shared ownership, private deals

Fabric's channels and private data let everyone read who owns a song, while the deal terms behind it stay between the two parties who signed it. The shared ledger stores only a cryptographic fingerprint of the private data, so the network can prove a payment was correct without seeing why.

Connecting the recording to the song

Today recordings are identified by ISRC codes and compositions by ISWC codes, in separate databases run by different companies. Spotify knows exactly which recording is playing but can't reliably tell who wrote it. RoyaltyChain stores a permanent three-way link, using DDEX, the data standard platforms and publishers already exchange.

Example identifiers.

Payments settle in USDC, a dollar stablecoin

Splitting ownership is only useful if the money that arrives is real and stable. RoyaltyChain pays out in USDC, so songwriters anywhere can use it without exposure to crypto prices.

Three layers, two API calls

For a streaming platform, using RoyaltyChain looks like using any other API vendor. All the blockchain work happens underneath.

# 1. on upload: look up the song's contract
GET  /songs/{isrc}  → contract address
# 2. each period: send the royalty pool
POST /contracts/{address}/pool

A song's life on RoyaltyChain

1. NewRegistration

   Before release, all rights holders register their wallets and agreed percentages. If they don't add up to exactly 100%, registration is rejected before any money is at stake.

2. NewPlatform upload

   The song goes up with its ISRC as usual. The platform makes one extra API call and stores the contract address.

3. UnchangedStreaming

   Listeners stream. The platform counts plays exactly as it does today.

4. UnchangedRoyalty calculation

   At the end of each month, the platform computes the song's royalty pool with its existing model.

5. NewSettlement

   The pool goes to the song's contract, which pays every wallet at once. Everyone is paid within minutes, with a full audit trail.

Try the split contract

Register a song's rights holders, then settle a month of royalties. The contract only deploys if the shares add up to exactly 100%. The hashes and addresses are real SHA-256 computed in your browser, on a demo network.

Value goes to creators instead of leaking along the chain

Today value is taken at every intermediary, and the creator gets the rest late. With RoyaltyChain, money moves from the platform to the creator at settlement, and intermediaries keep their service fees but not the float. Every new song registered makes the shared database more useful to everyone on it.

Who we onboard, and in what order

Everyone from the biggest label to a session musician uses the same platform. Adoption has a chicken-and-egg problem, though: labels need platforms' revenue data, and platforms need labels on board to see the benefit. So we start with the platforms, beginning with a free pilot at one of the 20 major streaming services.

1. Streaming platforms~$300Min legal settlements over historically unmatched royalties

   Spotify lists estimating royalties and identifying song ownership among its key risks, and the MLC has announced audits of Spotify, Apple Music and others for 2021–2023. Our pitch is regulatory relief: timestamped, immutable records.

2. Major labels$10–30Myearly savings from a 1–3% efficiency gain

   Universal's publishing arm earned $1.37B from streaming in 2024 at a 22% EBITDA margin, so 78 cents of each dollar is cost. Labels can also promise artists consistent payment within minutes.

3. Independents and societies36.09%independent market share in Q1 2024, above Universal's 29.35%

   Independent labels, self-released artists and collecting societies worldwide. Independents lose the most today: without a registered publisher entity, their publishing royalties vanish into the black box.

4. Songwriters and crewFreeincluded through their organizations

   They don't pay, but they vote, can upload their own copy of a contract to check it against the label's, and get paid straight to their own wallets.

A tiered subscription, not a fee per transaction

The industry processes tens of billions of streams a year. Per-transaction pricing would swing with outside events and make it easy for clients to leave the moment a competitor appears. A tiered yearly subscription is stable for both sides.

Selected sources

Each block header above shows the SHA-256 hash of that section's title and the previous block's hash, the same way blocks link on a chain.

• IFPI · Global Music Report 2024
• Spotify · Loud & Clear, 2025
• Music Business Worldwide · Where are the missing song royalties? (2019)
• NMPA · $424.38M in historical unmatched royalties paid to the MLC (2021)
• The MLC · Historical unmatched royalties
• Hyperledger Fabric 2.5 documentation · Introduction
• Secure Privacy · Blockchain immutability and GDPR Article 17 (2025)
• Music Business Worldwide · The MLC's audit notices to Spotify and other DSPs (2024)
• Universal Music Group · Full-year 2024 results
• International Artist Organisation · Streams & Dreams (2024)
• Hypebot · The failure of the Global Repertoire Database (2015)
• DDEX · Membership
• ChainLaunch · Fabric hosting cost calculator for AWS
• Curve Royalty Systems
• Monetizely · SaaS pricing benchmark study 2025
• US Bureau of Labor Statistics · Software developers