Learn how to offer fractionalized streaming royalties to customers of your distribution business. Fractionalizing royalties is an innovative way to incentivize fan participation and engagement.
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This tutorial is intended for music distribution businesses. It uses the and to integrate realtime fractionalized royalty payments into your existing distribution stack.
Fractionalizing ownership is a proven way to increase engagement and fun within communities. It's been for decades, and the idea has been discussed at length within the music industry with the advent of the sharing economy.
SHARE provides a flexible solution by fractionalizing revenues at the payments layer, rather than fractionalizing the IP ownership at the copyright layer. This means people can participate in the fun of revenue sharing and tradable splits, without the legal complexities around copyright ownership.
Faster Royalties (same day) via from DSPs that you support, such as Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora, Amazon, and YouTube Art Tracks, instead of waiting months to receive payment from streaming activities.
Community Splits: Customers can split a percentage of royalty revenues with up to 10,000 fans or collaborators, incentivizing massive network effects and a feeling of shared investment in their releases.
There are two technical integration paths to choose from depending on your needs:
No-Code: Customers can add share@formless.xyz to their royalty splits and FORMLESS will make the requisite backend API calls to distribute earnings using SHARE smart contracts. In this setup, FORMLESS serves analogous to a label, where payouts are settled on blockchain. This options requires no engineering work within your system if you meet our standard requirements.
API: Customers can add smart contracts as royalty recipients directly in your system, and you can execute payouts from within your service. This option is the most flexible but requires more work to setup.
Up to 50% of royalties delivered in realtime.
Prepayment not required, but available to select pre-vetted customers only.
Customize royalty delivery rates with full control of payments within your service.
Prepayment required for payments API credits.
Full community splits and smart contract creation capabilities.
Full community splits and smart contract creation capabilities.
No engineering required if standard requirements are met.
Significant engineering work required. Our team consults to ensure delivery on schedule.
Integration via API involves three parts:
First, please review the setup requirements in .
Next, please see the reference guides ( and ) as examples on how your customers will enable the feature. Upon completion your integration will receive a reference guide customized for your UI.
Determining whether a user logged into your system has a FORMLESS account. This can be achieved using the guide.
If a logged in user does have a FORMLESS account, enabling your customers to enter a smart contract ID string value as a royalty payment recipient and validating the ID. Validation can be done using the guide. You can think of a smart contract ID analogous to an email address entered for a payee. It's simply a string which identifies the payee and must be stored in your database. In this case, a single payee ID can correspond to thousands of downstream recipients.
Delivering a payment to the recipient contract ID at payout time. This can be achieved using the guide. In this step you'll be able to specify payable activity details and our API will deliver the payment to the recipient contract on blockchain. The contract will subsequently route payment to all requisite payees downstream. Programmatic payouts require , and due to streaming fraud, requires consideration around when to deliver payments and what rate of payments can be delivered in realtime.