For years, crypto has tried to break into the music industry.
3LAU’s Royal, Sound.xyz, and Stage have showcased how blockchain could give fans new ways to support artists, collect digital music, and participate in cultural moments.
But despite the early excitement, none of these platforms has managed to reshape the industry’s core infrastructure or reach everyday musicians at scale.
While they were consumer-facing experiments that were successful in their own right, Record Financial is taking a different swing.
For most artists, getting paid is still stuck in the dial-up era. A song might blow up overnight, but the royalty check might not land for months.
Money bounces through labels, publishers, distributors, and collecting societies, creating a maze of delays and obscure accounting.
Record Financial wants to flip that model. Its platform pulls in royalty data as it’s generated, normalizes it, and distributes payouts instantly via stablecoins like USDC using Avalanche.
What used to take months now settles in seconds, and everyone involved sees the same transparent ledger.
That’s already resonating with early adopters. Label and management company 11am, behind artists Armani White, RealestK, Lil Tjay, and others, is leveraging Record to bring real-time accounting to artists with significant cultural reach.
“Transparency has always been the pain point,” Travis Garrett, Record Financial CEO, told Decrypt. “If we can settle royalties at the speed they’re created, you eliminate so much friction that’s baked into the industry.”
To make it possible, a modern royalty system requires speed, reliability, and low-cost settlement, qualities that Avalanche is leaning into. The hope is that a single song can generate thousands of micropayments across platforms and countries.
Avalanche’s architecture is theoretically designed to handle that volume without being bogged down.
When asked why it would be different this time compared to other approaches, Ava Labs’ VP of OnChain Finance, Morgan Krupetsky, told Decrypt that many Web3-native founders in the past had tried and failed because they “didn’t understand the Web2 world.”
“Garrett comes from the Web2 world and understands it,” she added. “In addition, last time around, when we saw a lot of teams trying to do this, the stablecoin infrastructure wasn’t really as institutional.”
That’s where she says Avalanche comes in. Real-world builders are coming to Avalanche because they need financial infrastructure that actually scales.
Music royalties are a vast market, and putting them on-chain could open up real economic efficiency for creators, Krupetsky added.
Bigger than music
The same problems that plague music—tangled ownership, slow payouts, and manual reconciliation—also exist across film, TV, gaming, and digital media.
Record’s system is designed to extend beyond songs, offering a blueprint for a transparent creative economy where money moves at the same speed culture does. They plan to expand to film, TV, and gaming down the line.
“Some of our partners are true multi-hyphenates; they’re artists, but they also have TV shows and other ventures,” Garrett said.
“We’ve already been approached about applying this to film and TV, because the same problems exist there, the CEO added. “It’s a bit less complex, but the need for transparency is the same.”