Record Financial Pays Royalties in Real-Time via Avalanche

For most artists, getting paid remains stuck in what Record Financial CEO Travis Garrett describes as the ‘dial-up era.’ While a song might achieve viral success overnight, the corresponding royalty check typically takes months to materialize. This delay stems from money bouncing through multiple intermediaries including labels, publishers, distributors, and collecting societies, creating what Garrett calls ‘a maze of delays and obscure accounting.’ The traditional system’s lack of transparency has long been identified as the primary pain point for creators who struggle to track earnings across different platforms and territories.

Record Financial’s platform directly addresses this fundamental infrastructure problem by aggregating royalty data as it’s generated, normalizing it across different sources, and distributing payouts instantly via USDC stablecoins using the Avalanche blockchain. What traditionally required months of waiting now settles in seconds, with all parties accessing the same transparent ledger. This approach represents a significant departure from previous blockchain music initiatives like 3LAU’s Royal, Sound.xyz, and Stage, which focused primarily on consumer-facing features such as fan engagement and digital collectibles rather than tackling the core payment infrastructure affecting everyday musicians.

The choice of Avalanche blockchain proves crucial to Record Financial’s operational model, as modern royalty systems demand speed, reliability, and low-cost settlement capabilities. Morgan Krupetsky, VP of OnChain Finance at Ava Labs, emphasizes that a single successful song can generate thousands of micropayments across multiple platforms and countries, requiring blockchain architecture specifically designed to handle such volume without performance degradation. Avalanche’s technical infrastructure theoretically supports this high-throughput requirement while maintaining the low transaction costs essential for processing numerous small payments efficiently.

Krupetsky highlights why Record Financial’s approach might succeed where previous Web3-native attempts failed, noting that many earlier teams ‘didn’t understand the Web2 world’ while CEO Travis Garrett brings essential industry experience from that domain. Additionally, she points to the maturation of stablecoin infrastructure as a critical enabling factor that wasn’t available during previous blockchain royalty initiatives. The institutional-grade stability and reliability of USDC, combined with Avalanche’s scalable financial infrastructure, create the necessary foundation for handling the complex demands of global royalty distribution.

Record Financial’s solution is already gaining traction with significant industry players, most notably 11am Management, which represents prominent artists including Armani White, RealestK, and Lil Tjay. The management company is leveraging Record’s platform to provide real-time accounting transparency to artists with substantial cultural reach, demonstrating practical application beyond theoretical use cases. This early adoption validates the platform’s value proposition for established industry participants seeking to modernize their financial operations.

The company’s expansion strategy extends well beyond the music industry, targeting film, television, gaming, and broader digital media sectors that suffer from similar payment bottlenecks. As Garrett notes, ‘Some of our partners are true multi-hyphenates; they’re artists, but they also have TV shows and other ventures.’ The same fundamental issues of tangled ownership, slow payouts, and manual reconciliation plague these adjacent creative industries, creating natural expansion opportunities for Record’s transparent payment system. The company has already received inquiries about applying its technology to film and television, where Garrett observes ‘the same problems exist there… the need for transparency is the same,’ even if the complexity differs slightly from music industry royalty structures.

This planned expansion positions Record Financial to potentially reshape the entire creative economy by establishing a blueprint for transparent financial systems where money moves at the same speed culture does. By addressing the universal pain points across multiple creative sectors, the platform could unlock significant economic efficiency for creators who have long struggled with opaque payment systems and delayed compensation for their work.