For decades the music industry has operated on trust without transparency.
Labels, publishers and collection societies control the data that determines payouts while artists are left relying on delayed and often confusing reports.
Travis Garrett, CEO of Record Financial and Morgan Krupetsky, VP of on-chain finance at Ava Labs, joined TheStreet Roundtable to explain how a shared ledger could finally bring clarity to how music rights are recorded and enforced.
Why build on Avalanche
Krupetsky said that Avalanche’s architecture allows transparency without sacrificing privacy.
“The things that need to be public or can be public are and the things that need to be private can be as well,” she said.
Sensitive personal information can remain on private permissioned chains while transactional activity such as USDC payments can occur on public infrastructure.
That balance is intentional. Krupetsky cautioned against the common mistake of putting everything on chain.
“Sometimes teams try to force feed everything on chain and we are like wait this is not what this is for,” she said.
Avalanche works with partners to identify the minimum set of data that actually benefits from being immutable and shared.
Fixing the music royalties system
For music royalties that minimum data set is meaningful. Garrett explained that the royalty ecosystem is fragmented at a scale most outsiders do not understand.
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“There are multiple right types that are triggered on how it is consumed and there are a hundred thousand plus pay sources in the industry.”
Each source reports differently and reconciling that information is slow and error prone.
That fragmentation creates leverage for intermediaries. Garrett described a system where early registration often determines payouts even when data is wrong.
Once those splits are set correcting them can be extremely difficult.
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Unifying fragmented data
The absence of a single authoritative record is the core issue.
“There is not a single source of truth, Garrett said. “A ledger solves a lot of issues. You see when it is registered and there is one place where the registration exists.”
That visibility changes the power dynamic. Artists can see how rights are recorded and when payments are triggered instead of relying on delayed reports from third parties.
Labels and publishers do not disappear but their role becomes easier to audit.