Revelator launches decentralised blockchain-powered Artist Wallet for rights holders

By Emmanuel Legrand

Rights management company Revelator has launched its Artist Wallet, a new web app for music distribution and royalties, powered by its new decentralised Original Works platform. 

  The system is described as "the most advanced B2B layer of its kind for music and will enable millions of dollars to flow directly to rights holders’ non-custodial wallets."

  The Wallet will allow for direct payout between creators and right holders, and the benefits for artists are multiple, according to Revelator's CEO Bruno Guez: daily payments; control and transparency; income tracking with an estimated pipeline; and assets and royalties management.

An easy experience for users

  "The Wallet has been designed to make it easy for users," says Guez, speaking from Israel where he is based.

  Central to the system is blockchain-powered Original Works platform. Guez explains that it operates as a distributed ledger solution for digital asset management, copyright administration and royalty distribution to automate, streamline and standardise the process of creating fungible and non-fungible assets, managing IP rights, distributing NFTs, collecting royalties, and financing music royalties and creative assets. 

  Original Works also allows rights holders to register and tokenise their creative intellectual property and then use the Wallet to manage metadata, assign splits, request or send payments, and collect daily on royalty streams. 

Access to real-time financing

  For Guez, the Wallet will change the relationship that rights holders have with streams of revenues. Through the use of data from the source – the DSPs – each usage of music is identified and generates royalties. Normally, the systems used by most rights management companies still take into account the time difference between the moment content is used and the moment money is effectively paid to rights holders.

  Through the Wallet, Revelator allows users to track their revenues and request advances. If, for example, a song has been played 50,000 times in one day, the Wallet will calculate the estimated revenues that these plays generate and make that money available to the rights holders through advances. 

  "What we are saying is there's money that is waiting for you. You can take it now," says Guez, adding that by speeding up the payment process, the Wallet will be a real game changer in the rights management business. Guez says that 50,000 artist clients of Revelator will start receiving royalties directly through the Wallet, and will have access to real-time financing.

Transaction verified on the Ethereum blockchain

  Guez explains that Revelator holds funds in FDIC-insured bank accounts while tokenising those funds into a proprietary stablecoin, called the OWN Token. "This allows money to move between users 24/7 without the need to interact with a bank — all transactions are confirmed and verified on the Ethereum blockchain," says the company.

  In a presentation for potential users, Revelator claims that Original Works "is the only smart contract solution on the market to offer a turnkey micro-lending protocol for music royalties, accelerating the settlement and distribution of royalties to real-time for all rights holders." 

  For Guez, the key to the system is to make it simple for users. “Most musicians and labels aren’t crypto purists and they aren’t about to go deep into the tech. They just want things to work so they can make music,” he says.