Cryptocurrency for Music Royalties Management

By Aaron Scott, RadioPRO Chairperson

The global music market grew by 18.5% in 2021, with the fastest growth coming from Africa, Asia and Latin America. The United States, still the largest single market, grew by 9.1% across physical and digital sales. By 2022, streaming accounted for 84% of US music revenue, and in the UK some 39 million people were listening to streamed music every month.

Those numbers describe an industry in good health. They do not describe an industry in which the people making the music are doing well. Artists and rights holders sit at the centre of all this activity and receive a strikingly small share of what it generates – roughly 12% globally, by most estimates. The question this article looks at is whether cryptocurrency and blockchain can change that, and what RadioPRO intends to do about it.

Where the money goes now

Digital distribution transformed how music reaches listeners, and royalty systems have not kept up. The infrastructure was designed for an era of physical sales and scheduled broadcast, and it shows.

Royalty administration is fragmented. Contracts pass through banks of intermediaries – performing rights organisations, publishers, distributors – each operating with limited transparency and its own reporting cycle. Money moves slowly through that chain, and discrepancies accumulate along the way. The people at the end of it see a fraction of the income their work produced, often months after it was earned, with little means of checking the calculation.

For artists, this is not an abstract complaint. Outdated distribution mechanisms make it genuinely difficult to claim revenue that is already owed, and the administrative burden falls hardest on those least able to absorb it.

Aspect	Pre-Digital Transformation	Post-Digital Transformation
Revenue source	Physical & broadcast	Streaming & downloads
Artists’ share	Variable; often more generous	Approx. 12% globally
Distribution speed	Slower, periodic payments	Increased demand for real-time
Transparency level	Opaque	Needs improvement

What blockchain actually changes

Blockchain addresses a specific weakness in the existing system: there is no single record of who owns what and what was paid. A distributed ledger provides one. Transactions recorded on it cannot be altered afterwards, which means artists and other stakeholders can follow royalty distributions with a precision the current arrangement does not offer.

Smart contracts take this further. A smart contract is a piece of code that executes automatically when a defined condition is met – a stream, a download, a broadcast. Payment follows the event rather than the quarterly reporting cycle, and it follows it without anyone processing it by hand.

Fewer intermediaries

The more significant consequence is structural. If artists can transact directly with their audience, and fans can support artists without a label or agency in between, the distribution of power in the industry shifts. That is a large claim, and it is worth being precise about it: the technology makes disintermediation possible, it does not make it inevitable.

Traditional royalty distribution	Blockchain royalty distribution
Intermediary-dependent transactions	Peer-to-peer, intermediary-free transactions
Delayed and opaque royalty payments	Immediate and transparent payments
Complex rights management	Simplified and automated rights management
Variable fee structures	Lower or no transaction fees
Manual claims and distribution	Smart contract-enabled direct distributions

What exists already

This is not purely theoretical. Platforms such as Royal, Musicoin and BitSong have each attempted direct monetisation without intermediaries, with varying degrees of success and some real limitations. They are worth studying for both reasons.

RadioPRO’s own forthcoming investment in a blockchain platform is intended as a practical demonstration rather than an experiment. The underlying technology has been in limited use for years; the work now is scaling it so that payment moves from stream to artist’s wallet in a usable timeframe.

Aspect	Traditional royalty scheme	Blockchain royalty scheme
Payment speed	Delayed	Instant
Transparency	Low	High
Artist autonomy	Limited	High
Intermediaries	Multiple	None / minimal
Costs	High due to intermediaries	Reduced significantly

Cryptocurrency and the payout process

Paying in cryptocurrency removes several steps that exist only because money has to cross borders and institutions. Earnings arrive in a digital wallet rather than passing through correspondent banks, and the transfer is recorded publicly.

Feature	Traditional royalties	Cryptocurrency royalties
Payment speed	Delays common; processed manually	Instant; facilitated by smart contracts
Transparency	Opaque; difficult to track	Transparent; visible on the blockchain
Intermediaries	Multiple, including PROs and publishers	Minimal; direct to the artist’s wallet
Automation	Manual calculations and distributions	Fully automated via smart contracts

Tokenisation

Tokenisation means representing a right, or a share in a song’s earnings, as a digital asset on a ledger. The practical effect is that ownership and entitlement become visible and checkable, rather than buried in contracts held by other parties.

It also compresses the payment cycle. When a track is streamed, the artist can be paid almost immediately through a secure peer-to-peer transfer instead of waiting for an accounting period to close.

Aspect	Traditional royalty management	Tokenised royalty management
Transparency	Opaque, with multiple intermediaries	Highly transparent, direct overview of rights and earnings
Speed of payment	Delayed by intricate administrative processes	Immediate, following a secure peer-to-peer transfer
Control over rights	Limited due to complex distribution chains	Full digital ledger documentation held by the artist
Scope for innovation	Constrained by existing industry structures	Expanded, with room for artists to pioneer new models

Real-time payment through smart contracts

Smart contracts are written with defined rules that execute when a specified trigger occurs, such as a song being streamed. Instead of waiting for periodic disbursements that may contain errors or arrive late, payment happens at the point of use.

Because every transaction is recorded on a distributed ledger, the result is a permanent and publicly verifiable record. That is a direct answer to the opacity that has characterised royalty distribution for decades. In summary, the model offers:

payment at the point the music is consumed;
transparent record-keeping;
fewer intermediaries and lower associated costs;
greater trust between artists, listeners and the rest of the industry.

NFTs

Non-fungible tokens gave artists a way to mint work as authenticated, unique digital assets, and to receive a percentage of sales each time that asset is resold – something the traditional market never offered. Where the royalty agreement is encoded into the smart contract itself, payment on secondary sales follows automatically.

Traditional royalty system	NFT-based royalty system
Intermediary dependent	Direct artist-fan transactions
Opaque royalty calculations	Transparent and automated royalty distribution
Delayed payments to artists	Real-time royalty payments
No benefit from secondary sales	Royalties from resales paid to artists

What artists gain

Most of the industry’s long-standing frustrations – opaque accounting, slow decisions on royalty claims, and a general lack of control – stem from the same source: the artist is the last party in a chain they cannot see. Three changes follow from fixing that:

Direct payment. Earnings arrive without unnecessary delay or detour.
Fewer intermediaries. The ledger acts as both record and enforcement mechanism, reducing the need for third parties.
Greater control. Decisions about how and where music is distributed return to the person who made it.

Fan engagement

Decentralised platforms also change the relationship between artists and audiences, by allowing fans to invest directly in the work they care about rather than simply consuming it.

Platform type	Role in fan engagement	Benefits for fans
Music tokens	Fans buy tokens tied to artists or songs, giving them a stake in future revenue	Financial returns, exclusive content, a vote in artist decisions
NFT marketplaces	Collectors own, sell or trade unique digital merchandise	Verifiable ownership, potential increase in value, closer connection with artists
Fan funding platforms	Fans fund artist projects directly	Early access to music, credits in album notes, direct interaction with artists

Piracy

Content piracy continues to take revenue from artists and producers. An immutable ledger helps, because every transaction and transfer of ownership is logged permanently and is publicly verifiable. Proving ownership – often a slow and contested process – becomes a matter of consulting the record.

Content distribution aspect	Traditional systems	Immutable blockchain ledgers
Record keeping	Often manual, prone to errors	Digital, accurate and tamper-proof
Transparency	Limited visibility for stakeholders	Full transparency in transactions
Ownership tracking	Complex and occasionally ambiguous	Straightforward and indisputable
Royalty distribution	Delayed and often disputed	Instant and direct to rights holders
Piracy deterrence	Limited preventative measures	Improved prevention through traceability

Legal and regulatory questions

None of this operates outside the law, and the decentralised nature of blockchain creates genuine enforcement difficulties. Any system built on it has to work within existing copyright frameworks rather than around them.

Music crosses borders, so international regulation matters as much as national law. Navigating it requires a working knowledge of the treaties, agreements and procedures that govern cross-border royalty flows – and an approach in which every stakeholder has access to clear information about how the system treats them.

Consideration	Copyright compliance	International regulation
Blockchain adaptability	Must align with national copyright laws	Compliance with international treaties and conventions
Transparency	Traceable record of ownership and transactions	Auditable royalty distribution paths
Digital rights management	Encryption and access control mechanisms	Uniform standards despite varying regional laws
User education	Informing about copyright and proper use	Understanding of different royalty systems

The two systems side by side

Traditional royalty systems are slowed by layers of intermediation and by accounting practices that are difficult to inspect. Blockchain-based systems automate the transaction and remove much of the administrative overhead, which is where the efficiency gain comes from.

For an artist, the difference is concrete. Under the old arrangement, payment could take months to arrive and a meaningful portion was absorbed by administrative fees along the way. Real-time settlement pays at the point of use, and leaves an auditable trail of exactly what was paid and why.

Outlook

Blockchain is not a passing enthusiasm, and it is not a complete answer either. What it offers is a trustworthy and inspectable model for recording who owns what and who has been paid – which is precisely the thing the current system does worst.

The structures that have governed royalty distribution for decades are being reconsidered, and the direction of travel is towards something more direct and considerably faster. For artists that means more than an efficiency gain. It means a greater degree of control over their own work and their own income, which is the point of all of it.

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Harmonising Blockchain: Revolutionising Music Royalties Management with Cryptocurrency