Royal
Backed by a16z, Nas and The Chainsmokers, it paused royalty sales in 2024
A marketplace from DJ Justin '3LAU' Blau and Opendoor co-founder JD Ross that sold fans tokens entitling them to a share of a song's streaming royalties.
- Capital raised (announced)
- Estimated
Recorded announced backing; this is separate from cash received, customer deposits and money recovered.
- Royalties paid to collectors
Royal’s November 2022 account, relayed by Decrypt: artists paid NFT collectors. Not Royal revenue or an independently reconciled total.
Funding
| Round | Date | Announced | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | 2021 | ||
| Series A | 2021 |
Announced is what was said at the time. Cash actually received is rarely disclosed and is not assumed to match.
People
| Name | Role | Period | Now | Last checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Justin Blau | — | Makes electronic music and builds onchain | Oct 2026 | |
| JD Ross | — | Building WithCoverage, a company applying AI to insurance brokerage | Oct 2026 |
Timeline
January 2022
17 November 2022
Royal said artists had by then paid more than $100,000 in royalties to over 9,200 token holders.
10 April 2024
How it ended
Pivoted away
In April 2024 Royal said it would sunset its marketplace, including trading and edition pages, and pause new sales of royalty rights while it rebuilt its technology around on-chain data and turned toward provenance for AI-generated music. It said holders could still trade their tokens on OpenSea and claim royalties through its site. The company did not announce a shutdown.
Still alive
Open spot
Royal is gone. Is your music platform still running?
Spotlight your project here.
Sources
13 sources behind this page.
- 1Ep 143: JD Ross on the New Invention Era & Building with AI in 2026 · American Optimist (Joe Lonsdale) · Feb 2026
- 2Royal.io · Center for a Digital Future (Crypto Council for Innovation)
- 33LAU Raises $16M to Tokenize Music Royalties for Artists and Fans · CoinDesk · Aug 2021
- 4NFT Music Platform Royal Closes $55M Funding Round Led by A16z · CoinDesk · Nov 2021
- 53LAU's Royal Debuts Marketplace to Bring Music NFTs to the Masses · Decrypt · Nov 2022
- 6Royal opens music NFT trading marketplace · Decrypt · Nov 2022
- 7Royal 2.0: Rebuilding for Web3 · Royal (company blog on Mirror, now served by Paragraph; retrieved after the marketplace sunset) · Apr 2024
- 8Royal.io · Wikipedia · user-editable
- 9Royal X account posts, 15 March to 15 May 2024 · X (retrieved through twitterapi.io)
- 10X account profile currently holding the handle join_royal · X (retrieved through twitterapi.io)
Show 3 moreShow fewer
- 11X account profile for numeric id 1412452519880577034 · X (retrieved through twitterapi.io)
- 12Posts by @justinblau, 26 August 2021 (seed announcement day) · X (via twitterapi.io)
- 13X account record for @justinblau · X (via twitterapi.io)
Every figure above is clickable and opens the sources behind it. Copies were stored when each source was read, so a citation still resolves after the page it came from is gone.