For years, crypto has tried to penetrate the music industry.
3LAUs Royal, Sound.xyzAnd Phase have shown how blockchain can provide fans with new ways to support artists, collect digital music and participate in cultural moments.
But despite early excitement, none of these platforms have managed to reshape the industry’s core infrastructure or reach everyday musicians at scale.
Although they were consumer-oriented experiments that were successful in their own right, Financial recording takes a different turn.
For most artists, getting paid is still stuck in the dial-up era. A song can blow up overnight, but the royalty check might not arrive for months.
Money bounces through labels, publishers, distributors and collecting societies, creating a maze of delays and obscure accounting.
Record Financial wants to turn that model around. The platform collects royalty data as it is generated, normalizes it, and immediately distributes payouts via stablecoins such as USDC using Avalanche.
What used to take months is now done in seconds and everyone involved sees the same transparent ledger.
This is already resonating with early adopters. Label and management company 11ambehind artists Armani White, RealestK, Lil Tjay and others, uses Record to provide real-time accounting for artists with significant cultural reach.
“Transparency has always been the pain point,” said Travis Garrett, CEO of Record Financial Declutter. “If we can offset royalties at the rate at which they accrue, you eliminate so much of the friction that is ingrained in the industry.”
To make this possible, a modern royalty system requires speed, reliability and cheap settlement, qualities that Avalanche relies on. The hope is that a single number can generate thousands of micropayments across platforms and countries.
Avalanche’s architecture is theoretically designed to handle that volume without getting bogged down.
When asked why it would be different this time compared to other approaches, Morgan Krupetsky, VP of OnChain Finance at Ava Labs, said: Declutter that many Web3-native founders had tried and failed in the past because they “didn’t understand the Web2 world.”
“Garrett comes from the Web2 world and gets it,” she added. “Also, the last time we saw a lot of teams trying this, the stablecoin infrastructure wasn’t really that institutional.”
That’s where Avalanche comes into play, she says. Real-world builders come to Avalanche because they need financial infrastructure that can actually scale.
Music rights are a huge market, and connecting them could create real economic efficiencies for creators, Krupetsky added.
Bigger than music
The same problems that plague music – confused ownership, slow payouts and manual tuning – also exist in film, TV, gaming and digital media.
Designed to go beyond songs, Record’s system provides a blueprint for a transparent creative economy where money moves at the same speed as culture. They plan to expand into film, TV and gaming in the future.
“Some of our partners are true multi-hyphenates; they’re artists, but they also have TV shows and other ventures,” Garrett said.
“We have already been approached to apply this to film and TV as the same issues exist there,” the CEO added. “It’s a little less complex, but the need for transparency is the same.”