DJ 3LAU Establishes NFT Music Investment Platform Royal by Obtaining $16M in Seed Funding

American DJ and electronic dance music producer Justin Blau, also known as 3LAU, established the blockchain music investment company Royal, supported by a $16 million seed round led by cryptocurrency investment company Paradigm and Peter Thiel‘s Founders Fund.

The Royal blockchain music NFT investment platform was founded by 3LAU and his university friend JD Ross. It aims to provide music-loving users and creators with unique ownership tokenized investment platforms while allowing music copyrights and autographed digital asset records on a specific blockchain.

Blau stated that the launch of the music investment platform Royal is to provide fans with an opportunity to make money with their favourite artists said:

"I always tell people that artists' popularity is completely dependent on the fans and the listeners, not the companies and the distributors. If the fans like the music, they share it, they go to the shows, they're fully responsible for augmenting an artist's popularity. So why shouldn't those participants achieve upside for believing in someone early?"

According to the Forbes report, the team does not determine which blockchain platform will become the basis of the Royal platform yet but stated that it would launch a beta version of the platform in the next six months and aim to promote it within eight months. The project would be completely "community-run", the team added.

Through the new Royal project, Blau and his team hope to introduce tokenized ownership in the main recording rights of songs and provide collectors with concert tickets and backstage passes through so-called "limited digital assets" (Royal's version), Special privileges including commodities, non-fungible tokens (NFT).

The non-fungible token (NFT) method has changed the creator’s rules of creation. In the future, the music can be directly faced by the audience without intermediaries and labels.

Although Blau believes that the Royal platform can potentially influence the entire record industry, he said that in the future, he would not rule out the possibility of cooperating with record companies such as Sony and Universals.

Image source: 3lau