Stripe powers Revelator’s mission to bring more music companies, creators and fans painlessly into web3.

Revelator has chosen Stripe to let fans use a credit card to purchase digital collectibles directly from artists, with no additional digital wallet required. By offering fans the ability to purchase using their credit cards, Revelator has optimized for simplicity and conversion of web2 users into web3 buyers.

Revelator’s platform is the first to integrate web3 functionality alongside its best-in-class management digital music supply chain, royalties, and reporting, enabling labels, publishers, distributors, and creators to unlock a new direct to fan revenue stream with digital collectibles and payments powered by Stripe.

“Using Stripe, Revelator will play a crucial role in helping to garner widespread use of web3 from non-crypto natives in the music industry,” says Bruno Guez, CEO and founder of Revelator. “This is a major step toward Revelator’s vision of onboarding more labels, artists, and fans onto web3, to bring these promising digital assets to the mainstream of music fans. Right now, too much arcane technical knowledge is required to get music fans and music companies really excited about what should be a thrilling new medium,” explains Guez.

Revelator has developed a new, ridiculously easy-to-use NFT on-ramp to its Revelator Pro platform that enables customers to create, sell, distribute and manage NFTs, alongside all their other business activity, in one place—an industry first. This new offering will build one of the first substantial bridges between music’s web2 present and its web3 future.

Stripe, which provides financial infrastructure for businesses, manages KYC, fraud, and disputes for its partners, creating a seamless user experience for first-time NFT purchasers. Customers who have set up an account can purchase NFTs with one click. Thanks to Revelator’s integration of these features, labels, management companies, and distributors will be able to offer new web3-related products and services to their artists or directly to fans, without incurring gas fees, in a confidence-inspiring, secure way.

Revelator continues to forge a path toward a new, hybrid future that supports a range of business models and will support Revelator’s ongoing efforts to help music companies and creators bridge web2 and web3.

About Revelator
Revelator is the leading provider of digital IP infrastructure to music companies around the world. We offer leading technology solutions that power music businesses, worldwide. Revelator is reshaping digital ownership to power the music 3.0 economy, by increasing speed, accuracy, and transparency in rights management, digital supply chain, and royalty distribution.

ANote Music, Europe’s leading marketplace for investing in music royalties, is announcing a partnership with Revelator, the pioneering provider of digital IP infrastructure to music rights holders and global music companies. As of today, ANote becomes the preferred partner for Revelator clients to list their catalogues. Through ANote‘s platform, Revelator will expand its stellar offerings and provide music IP financing services for the first time. These services will democratise fan and investor access to Revelator-managed IP.

Revelator clients and rights holders will be able to list shares of tracks in their music catalogues on the ANote Music Platform. Each catalogue will be fractionalised in a number of shares, available for bidding by investors on the ANote Music platform, creating new investment opportunities in a diversified asset which generates a constant flow of passive music royalty income. This enables rights holders to further leverage on their assets, while sharing the future success and royalty streams with fans and investors. The partnership will also enable collaborations between ANote Music and Revelator on integration of Revelator’s technology, data management, predictive models, and payment systems into ANote. This will provide investors more visibility into royalty streams and bring Revelator’s strength in data management into ANote’s infrastructure.

Marzio F. Schena, CEO and Co-Founder of ANote Music, said: “We’re hugely excited to be supporting Revelator’s entry into music IP trading, as well as taking the next step in our own mission to further boost the goals and ambitions of all players operating across music rights as a sector. Since our inception, we have admired Revelator’s work in empowering rights holders of creative IP through their innovative and forward-thinking platform and services. Clearly, we share similar values as companies, and I am sure this partnership will open doors for us both as we strive to democratise access to IP in general.”

Revelator is the top blockchain-based digital asset management and data platform for creative IP, empowering open participation in a secure and robust marketplace. A pioneer in the web3 music space, it was one of the earliest companies to make use of blockchain’s transparency and efficiency for artists, fans, and investors alike. Its services aim to increase speed, accuracy, and transparency in rights management, digital supply chain, and royalty distribution.

Bruno Guez, CEO and Founder of Revelator, said: “The business of IP trading has been on our radar for some time, and watching ANote over the last couple of years, it became clear they were the go-to partner to facilitate this. We completely align with their goal of democratising access to music IP in a profitable way for all involved and feel this is only the beginning of what we can achieve together.”

About Revelator
Revelator is the industry leading data management, reporting and analytics platform, working to solve the problems of royalty distributions to copyright owners and creators across IP verticals. Revelator offers a turnkey solution for today’s digital business, enabling rights owners to manage their assets, rights, and data with unprecedented simplicity and efficiency in an easy to use web and mobile interface. Revelator is a digital asset and blockchain-based distribution platform for creative IP, empowering anyone to participate in a secure and robust marketplace. Revelator transforms creative IP into digital assets to unlock the value of tomorrow’s ownership economy. With Revelator, anyone can seamlessly manage custody of their IP and fractional ownership, monetize their content and digital assets, generate asset-backed cash advances against royalties, and accelerate payments.

About ANote Music
Founded in Luxembourg by Marzio F. Schena, Matteo Cernuschi, and Grégoire Mathonet in January 2018, ANote Music operates as the main stage of music investment world, acting as the go to platform for publishers, record labels, and artists a platform to sell music rights, introducing them to a new system of financing, as well as offering users a new investment opportunity and the chance to own shares in promising artists. In the world of live music and festivals, the main stage is where the biggest and best acts come to play. People flock there knowing they are about to experience something special. In the music royalty investment market, the same goes. Bridging the gap between music and finance, ANote is a global destination where people can invest and trade in musical culture. With leading technology and an innovative blockchain supported platform, investors and artists know they are about to experience something far superior to anywhere else. From Rock to Deep house, ANote is building a community where everyone who lives and breathes music can now start earning from it in a new way. Whether you are a rights owner looking to list or just someone who wants to invest in the next big asset class, ANote offers a secure and accessible platform to make owning and sharing a piece of your favourite song safe and simple. At present, the total amount raised by the company stands at over €1.5million. ANote Music is also supported by Luxinnovation, the Luxembourg national innovation agency. ​

Revelator announces the hiring of seasoned entrepreneur and Web3 artisan Gilad Woltsovitch, to spearhead the Web3 experience for Revelator users.

As the innovative blockchain-based digital music management platform, Revelator powers the organization, tracking, and promotion of music in both Web2 and Web3. Revelator is committed to providing the independent ecosystem with decentralized systems to manage their digital music IP on the blockchain  – enabling faster, more efficient payments to artists and rights holders. As part of increased expansion into Web3 development, Revelator is currently building a tool designed specifically for managing Web3 music IP at the supply chain level called the “Creator Studio.” 

“With Web3 comes unique opportunities for artists and labels to release music in new ways, but with additional avenues come management nightmares. Revelator helps solve these pain points and provides a simplified and streamlined management experience,” says Revelator founder and CEO Bruno Guez. “By making the ecosystem more decentralized and open, we will benefit the entire supply chain. We are thrilled that Gilad will join us in this endeavor.”

Woltsovitch brings his expertise in bridging complex management processes with simplified user interfaces and leveraging blockchain technology to benefit the consumer to Revelator. He co-founded two platforms to make the global credit industry more accessible and decentralized: enterprise Blockchain platform Credium, and online lending platform with a machine learning underwriting model Backed Inc.
 
“Web2 is very good at extracting value and then funneling it up to the platforms that serve the content, and not the creators who create the content. It’s in that area that I'm most interested in exploring and building in Web3 in general, to create adaptation and adoption in a cultural sense,” says Woltsovitch. “Revelator is one unique and powerful offering in this space, and onboarding the existing infrastructure into Web3 is an immensely complicated challenge that is very exciting to me. That's why I joined the team.” 

Greatly influenced by the collapse of the music industry in the early 2000s, decentralization is at the core of Gilad Woltsovith’s every venture. He is an activist and volunteer in his community, serving as a local municipality board member and advocate for decentralized public-resource and fund management solutions. 

About Revelator
Revelator is the leading provider of digital IP infrastructure to music companies around the world. Revelator’s IP SaaS platform increases speed, accuracy and transparency in rights management, digital supply chain and royalty distribution. Revelator’s Web3 infrastructure transforms music IP into a digital asset, connecting traditional royalty pipes to on-chain protocols and DeFi projects and empowering anyone to participate in a dynamic music IP marketplace.

Now labels, distributors, managers, and data-driven music teams can get decision-defining insights to inform A&R, marketing, and royalty forecasting strategies.

Revelator is bringing full-on business intelligence to the independent music business with its insights platform, Data Pro. This BI product offers in-depth, cross-platform analysis of all major DSPs and UGC platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. Tailored to the needs of financial managers, data analysts, music marketers, and A&R managers, it helps clients uncover meaningful trends, pinpoint newly emerging audiences, and better understand how fan activity can affect their revenue.

“Consumption and royalty data are often streaming into music businesses via two different, completely separate channels,” explains Revelator founder and CEO Bruno Guez. “Connecting these two datasets leads to deeper understanding of what exactly is shaping and driving their business. This is the access to data insights that’s been available to the major players in the music business, but never for the independent side of the music industry beyond a smattering of charts and graphs.”

By integrating granular first-party consumption, engagement, playlist and listener data across services and platforms, customers can easily interpret audiences by location, demographics, device and subscription level. Teams can uncover the source of the stream that is driving music discovery.

Music marketers can also quantify how much a song is earning or how their campaigns are performing that day. “There is a growing need for automated reporting and the ability to streamline the time-consuming operations of consolidating and sharing data with the rest of the organization in their weekly reports to artist management and marketing teams,” Guez reveals. “The value of music assets should be updated on a daily basis to maximize the measurable impact that data reporting holds for making marketing and financial decisions.” 

Revelator’s Data Pro business intelligence platform incorporates machine learning with a financial analysis layer to help customers develop revenue projections based on historical data and evaluate the performance of their creative assets to inform  touring, advertising, and royalty pipeline visibility. Combining consumption data with revenue data adds real-time financial perspective: knowing when the song is at its peak value may help stakeholders make decisions when to sell their catalog or invest in an artist.

Artist management firm mtheory uses Revelator’s Data Pro to enable its marketers and analysts to make smarter business decisions to drive their artists’ careers. Managing Director Zack Gershen says, "We all know that data is more critical than ever to make sound marketing and investment decisions. The independent label space has long struggled with reliable data solutions that can scale and are affordable. Revelator has been a great partner in helping us with our data visibility, giving us the ability to do high level trend analysis and make smarter decisions on behalf of our roster of artists."

Labels, publishers, distributors and managers can go here to learn more. 

About Revelator
Revelator is the leading provider of digital IP infrastructure to music companies around the world. Revelator’s IP SaaS platform increases speed, accuracy and transparency in rights management, digital supply chain and royalty distribution. Revelator’s Web3 infrastructure transforms music IP into a digital asset, connecting traditional royalty pipes to on-chain protocols and DeFi projects and empowering anyone to participate in a dynamic music IP marketplace.

Noah Roth Joins Revelator as VP, Sales and Marketing

Experienced executive Noah Roth is joining Revelator as Vice President of Sales and Marketing, to usher in the music services company’s next phase of growth at a time of increased innovation in the industry. 

“Noah brings essential expertise to Revelator at a vital time, when we have built a dedicated customer base but are now ready to do so much more, as the music business is expanding and growing more complex and multifaceted,” says Bruno Guez, founder and CEO of Revelator. “His fresh, but informed perspective is the perfect fit for what we need right now.”

“What’s really exciting about Revelator is what the company is building at the intersection of web2 and 3,” explains Roth. “The company’s sales have grown by more than 100% in a year. Revelator’s product has proven product-market fit in a large market. A strong core product, plus a groundbreaking innovative one, means Revelator is uniquely positioned to take off, something I’m looking forward to being a part of.”

Roth’s experience has spanned five industries, including intellectual property, ad tech, legal tech, and talent recruitment, joining companies poised for expansion and taking them to the next level. From this extensive background, Roth has distilled fundamental insights into sales and growth he’s eager to apply at Revelator. “The common thread that runs through all my experiences is recognizing that moment of scalable growth and helping your team realize how to kick it up a notch,” he reflects.

About Revelator
Revelator is the leading blockchain-based digital asset management platform for creative IP, empowering anyone to participate in a secure and robust marketplace. Revelator provides a unified data platform for asset management, supply chain, business intelligence, financial reporting, royalty and payment distribution. Revelator’s Web3 infrastructure transforms creative IP into digital assets and offers modern protocols for fractional ownership, smart contracts and real-time on-chain settlement of music royalties to individual rights holder’s digital wallets.

Revelator’s Original Works Integrates with the Flow Blockchain

Original Works' Artist Wallet now lets users bring digital music assets to Flow, enabling artists and rights holders to mint, manage, and sell digital collectibles across marketplaces

Revelator’s Original Works continues to make it easier for catalog owners to bring music IP to the blockchain, this time by adding Flow to the mix, the blockchain built for the next generation of apps, games, and the digital assets that power them. Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot and CryptoKitties and the original creators of Flow, have also invested in Revelator.

“Original Works is not only the first music IP solution to be up and running and paying artists on the blockchain, but it’s also now the first to be fully interoperable across multiple blockchains thanks to our integration with Flow,” notes Revelator CEO Bruno Guez. “By bringing more real music assets into the Flow ecosystem, we’re paving the way for music IP to realize unprecedented success.” 

Original Works, the leading Web3 Protocol for music IP, transforms music IP into a digital asset and connects traditional revenue pipes to on-chain protocols, so that artists can easily monetize their IP and maximize yields across their entire portfolio. Its Artist Wallets have already been successfully piloted with innovative Finland-based artist service company Family in Music, one of the first real-life applications of blockchain technology for music rights and royalties.

“It’s so exciting to see Flow becoming the blockchain for music creators, IP holders and fans, and this is just the beginning,” said Mickey Maher, SVP of Partnerships, Dapper Labs. “Revelator is truly changing the game for artists with Original Works by giving them the tools they need on both the front and back end to monetize their music IP.”

Revelator foresees a time when tens of thousands of the artists its customers work with will be able to take advantage of Original Works’ Web3 protocols with efficient payments and superior user experience. Flow will play an integral part in these efforts, as it demystifies the process of getting assets on chain swiftly and securely. Artists and rights holders will be able to mint, manage, and sell digital collectibles across marketplaces directly from their Artist Wallet. 

“We’re thrilled to be able to offer artists, labels, and other rights holders the ability to get their assets on Flow, and we’re equally excited that Dapper Labs has validated our approach to managing music assets on-chain,” says Guez. “We want to create a new digital asset class and unlock the full value of the creator economy for our customers.”

About Revelator

Revelator is the leading blockchain-based digital asset management platform for creative IP, empowering anyone to participate in a secure and robust marketplace. Revelator provides a unified data platform for copyright management, supply chain, business intelligence, financial reporting, royalty and payment distribution. Revelator’s Web3 infrastructure transforms creative IP into digital assets and offers modern protocols for managing fractional ownership, and real-time on-chain settlement of music royalties on Flow, Binance, and Ethereum.

Revelator has run another successful pilot of its new blockchain-based Original Works platform with trusted client Family in Music, a Finland-based creator services company. Revelator and Family in Music together tested Original Works’ Artist Wallet daily royalty payout feature, paying artists for the first time ever in a mere 24 hours.

The Artist Wallet is the hub of Original Works platform, the most robust decentralized music rights management protocol ever. Using the Wallet as a virtual home base, artists and labels can monitor their usage data, set up automated song splits, arrange daily royalty settlements, and soon receive micro-advances, as easily as they’d post to social media. Family in Music invited around 20 creators to use the Wallet, first for song split management and then for daily royalty settlements, as opposed to the quarterly or longer settlement periods typical in the industry. 

“Family in Music is committed to improving and elevating the experience for independent music creators and industry professionals, including being able to receive royalties on a daily basis, taking advantage of creative rights management tools, and having greater security and transparency in transactions,” says Family in Music CCO Jani Jalonen. “We're at the forefront representing an exciting leap forward in helping the sector to do better business, and they're powered by the Wallet.”

This pilot helps prove that blockchain-based music rights administration is not only possible, but stands to benefit creators  in clear ways. It builds on several other highly successful tests of the technology with major global publishers and with Finnish CMO Teosto and music usage tracking experts BMAT, providing royalties to songwriters and publishers. This pilot used one smart contract per release to ensure money flowed into the Artist Wallet in a couple of minutes, with fees lower than what traditional structures charge for royalty collection. 

“In the music blockchain world, you get some people who are very fresh faced and full of energy with romantic views that don’t add up to viability,” explains Kevin Bacon, Family in Music’s Chief Innovation Officer. “In publishing, for example, there is a manifold of things to solve and it soon becomes so complex that a simple tokenized system doesn’t work. It’s all the years and background work, the power hours that the Revelator team have put into this, that makes Revelator the only viable platform of its kind because it stands on bigger pillars and a firmer foundation.  No one else in the world is really doing it, not to professional standards.” 

“Our past pilots focused on CMOs, but this is our first proof of how well this system can work for artists. These real-life stress tests are essential to progressing decentralized tools for an industry that desperately needs better and faster ways to pay for rights usage and to manage valuable digital assets,” says Bruno Guez, founder and CEO of Revelator. This is the first successful use case of daily royalty payments made directly to artists using blockchain.  “The Artist Wallet is the cornerstone of what we hope will be a new approach that will increase efficiency and ultimately improve artists’ lives. There are many visions floating around for blockchain or other decentralized solutions for the music industry’s woes, but none that actually exist and work and pay artists--until now.”

About Revelator

Revelator was founded by music industry veteran Bruno Guez. Backed by a team of seasoned music industry and software development professionals, Revelator is a leading provider of artist distribution platforms, royalty and payment services for today’s digital business. It has to built a state-of-the-art platform for digital music to increase speed, accuracy, and transparency of rights management, digital supply chain, and royalty payment distribution, so distributors, labels, and artists can focus on being creative and make the world a more beautiful place.

About Family in Music

Family in Music is building a global growth engine to empower creators and professionals with the knowledge, people, and tools to take control of their own careers. Family in Music is here to support everyone working in independent music, however, they are launching with a focus on songwriters. First to create, last to get paid. Family in Music is in beta, so they welcome everyone’s feedback, and so the platform is currently free of charge. Create a profile at www.familyinmusic.com today. 

Revelator’s Original Works opens up its decentralized Wallet to 50K customers via new, intuitive web app.

Revelator is announcing the launch of a new web app for music distribution and royalties, which includes the Artist Wallet, the hub for its new decentralized Original Works platform. After several wildly successful pilots involving both publishing and performing rights, Revelator is opening up its extensive customer base to the benefits of decentralized tech/blockchain. The system will be the most advanced B2B layer of its kind for music and will enable millions of dollars to flow directly to rightsholders’ non-custodial wallets, the company affirms. And unlike other visionary blockchain and NFT solutions, this one actually exists.

Though artists and rightsholders will reap the benefits of an innovative decentralized system, (lightning-fast payments, better IP management via smart contracts, and instant micro-advances), they will discover Original Works Wallets are remarkably simple to navigate. No MetaMask accounts or complicated multi-step processes are involved; Original Works’ Wallet feels a lot like payment and social apps musicians already use every day.

This is by design; Guez knows cool tech is pointless if artists, labels, and rightsholders can’t or won’t adopt it. “The working options out there are too niche, too limited, or too complicated,” explains Relevator founder and CEO, Bruno Guez. “Most musicians and labels aren’t crypto purists and they aren’t about to go deep into the tech. They just want things to work so they can make music.”

Original Works allows rightsholders to register and tokenize their creative intellectual property. They can then use the Wallet to manage metadata, assign splits, request or send payments, and collect daily on royalty streams. Thanks to these income streams, Wallet users can secure real-time financing and transfer their Wallet balance to crypto or fiat currency accounts (including PayPal). They can also create smart contracts to streamline licensing of audio or audio-visual assets—a combination of key activities no other platform offers. “You can do everything a rights holder or artist needs to do, from one app, on your phone or laptop,” says Guez.

Guez should know; he and his team have years of data on the music ecosystem and the processes that dominate its business side. Guez knows the stumbling blocks and pain points rights holders face, thanks to his industry-leading work with thousands of rightsholders, CMOs, and other stakeholders. Revelator created the first copyright API with Polaris, powers numerous services for Soundrop and Identity Music to Freeme Digital, and helps major management agencies and UGC media companies gather and analyze their streaming data and pay out royalties. Built on that foundation, Original Works makes blockchain work for music, not music work on blockchain.

While the road to decentralized, peer-to-peer music business apps is littered with great ideas—from the ICOs of the past to the current fascination with NFTs and DAOs—Revelator has built something real and useful. “There are a lot of inspiring visions floating around for how to make music benefit from decentralized protocols, and there have been many attempts to implement them for digital music assets,” Guez notes. “However, no one has managed what we have at the scale we have, with proven and tested technology and with a truly easy to use UI.”

Thanks to a $1.3-million grant, innovative creator rights management company expands its web3-based Wallet to provide instant financial support to artists and rightsholders.

Revelator, the creative rights management and monetization innovators, are expanding their Original Works platform’s Artist Wallet, which enables rightsholders to collect revenue and manage assets at lightning speed. “We’re creating a highly efficient decentralized back end for the creative industries, starting with music,” explains founder and CEO Bruno Guez. “Our goal is to help every creator turn their IP into digital assets they can easily sell or monetize.”

Part of this process has involved deploying Original Works to do the seemingly impossible: get rightsholders paid extremely quickly. In a 2020 pilot with a major global publisher, Revelator was able to reduce settlement time from months to days. Processing 7 months of data, more than 9 billion streams in a day, Revelator got rightsholders their mechanicals payments via their Wallets in under 30 days, rather than an entire quarter or more later. “We are within striking distance of daily settlements,” adds Guez. A 2019 pilot with Finnish PRO Teosto and BMAT showed how Original Works’ Artist Wallets could put funds in the hands of songwriters mere hours after radio airplay.

In addition to dramatically improved settlement speeds via the Artist Wallet, Revelator will soon offer users decentralized financial tools. The company has been awarded a $1.3-million research and development grant from the Israeli Innovation Authority. This grant will be used to fully develop micro-financing products for its 45,000 rightholders, with funds going directly into their Wallets in seconds. This will expand the impact of Original Works, allowing creators to fund new projects and giving them a whole new level of independence.

“We’re expanding the ways decentralized protocols and smart contracts can forge a new path in an industry that has long struggled with slow and inaccurate payments and complex administrative systems. Many startups have attempted this, but we’ve actually achieved it. This grant demonstrates the strength of our technology,” explains Bruno Guez, CEO and founder of Revelator. “We’re honored to be recognized by the IIA and to bring permissionless financial tools to artists and creators worldwide,”

More about Revelator’s groundbreaking Original Works platform here: original.works/en/about

Revelator sprang from the assumption that music business systems could be dramatically improved and that decentralized approaches would yield the greatest impact. With a comprehensive view of how transactions work in music, Revelator distills nearly everything artists do and need into one simple set of interlocking, truly global tools.
 
These tools upend industry norms. Thanks to its already successful Original Works platform, Revelator has put blockchain to work for artists, labels, publishers, and CMOs. Payments can happen today, not next quarter. Based on a digital wallet of assets and funds, IP assets can be shared or reassigned clearly and permanently via smart contracts, using an interface anyone can understand. Claims or microloans can happen right there on the platform.

Founded by a life-long producer, music scholar, label head, and artist advocate, Bruno Guez, Revelator has started to prove what blockchain can do for music. Revelator has worked closely with leading rights organizations (Teosto), major music distributors (CD Baby/Soundrop), and platforms (Wix Music). The ultimate goal is simple: to change the business for the better by empowering creative professionals through creative IP management and peer-to-peer finance.

Revelator is the logical extension of how the internet globalized the music industry. “Artists and fans have been connecting directly for decades, and artists have been collaborating remotely together for years,” says Guez. “The peer-to-peer approach is just starting to transform royalties and creative IP. We’re at the start of a transactional economy that promises to change the way we create, listen to, and pay for music.”

For those dedicated to music practice and business, Revelator’s approach to blockchain feels refreshing. It’s less about asking what music can do with blockchain, but grasping what blockchain can do for music. The music comes first; the technology merely enables the process.

Guez saw keenly how desperately things needed to change as he attempted to manage his own musical catalog during a period of intense change. Guez studied Ethnomusicology at UCLA, and made a name for himself as a global music instigator, djing in LA clubs, founding Quango Music Group (Tricky, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Sneaker Pimps, Talvin Singh), and working as music director for Cirque du Soleil. He cut a deal with Palm Pictures and Island Records. Guez became a sync and licensing whiz, working with major TV, films, and brand partners. At the label’s peak during the iTunes era, Guez employed seven people to help run the business.

It was a business undergoing extreme transition. Guez knew he was in for a wild ride when a friend from London showed him this cool new app called Spotify. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh shit we’re in trouble’,” Guez recalls. “I knew we were going to lose money again as an industry. Then 99 cents per download became a fraction of a penny per stream.”

As he watched the recorded music business struggle, he pushed to maximize the impact of the artists and tracks he worked with. He downsized, moved from LA to Israel, and created systems to streamline rights management, customizing Salesforce to handle the workflow. 

Salesforce’s cloud capabilities suggested new possibilities, and Guez decided to make a commercial, cloud-based product out of his custom system. Revelator was born, eventually powering distribution and royalty accounting solutions for large independent distributors like Soundrop, a division of CD Baby/Downtown. Revelator’s professional platform is the first fully globalized IP management system, currently supporting 45 languages and variations in contracts and rights. 

As Revelator evolved, Guez got intrigued by blockchain, in particular by the opportunities afforded by smart contracts. This was 2016, when the tech was still nascent and blocks only held 1 MB of data. There was one other, huge catch: The music business wasn’t built for this kind of peer-to-peer transaction and transparency. It couldn’t even come together to decide on a global rights database.

Guez and his team set to work building a new infrastructure for the music industry, from the ground up. Based on blockchain, Revelator’s Original Works lets rightsholders manage their IP as fluidly as they might manage a social media account, using a digital wallet to collect royalties, assign ownership, and gain access to microfinance based on their existing revenue streams. Guez considered the problem from the rightsholder’s perspective, one he knew intimately: “Digital wallets and smart contracts are the way to use this tech in the music industry. You can store all your copyright metadata, rights, and digital transactions in an app and access it via any device. The digital wallet is your control center. You can get push notifications letting you know you got paid and get advances based on your daily earnings. Smart contracts let us connect wallets and manage splits, pro rata shares, everything.”

Revelator’s innovative foundation and features proceed from Guez’s deep experience with music and its movement around the globe. It’s beyond blockchain for its own sake. It is about creating a new world, where artists can make the most of their creative lives and their teams can support their ambitions and connections. And finally, Guez feels, the world is catching up to Revelator’s vision: “We got into blockchain very early, almost too early,” he says with a chuckle. “It baffled many of the people we demoed for. Now, everyone is excited and ready to pursue a new digital asset strategy.” 

The way forward won’t be easy, but Guez sees that music itself is changing rapidly, merging with the bigger sea of creative content and assets. The business will have to embrace broader collaboration, faster licensing, bigger-picture thinking about music’s role in art and entertainment at large. “Music is a legacy industry,” Guez explains. “Blockchain’s finance disruption plus the digitalization of music is leading to an industry that’s real time, liquid, accessible and programmable or composable. We’ll need a new way of thinking of art  and new ways to monetize IP. That’s the imminent revolution in music, reshaping of the marketplace and creative expression and the way that flows between participants who aren’t music insiders or specialists. Anyone can participate.”