JD Ross (@justindross) and Justin Blau (@3LAU), co-founders of Royal, join Erik Torenberg and co-host Ian Cinnamon for this episode of Venture Stories web3 series. Takeaways:

- Royal stems from their vision to invest in talent early on.

- Streaming increased by 60-70x in about 5 years from 2015 on.

- The barrier to entry for artists is much lower — they no longer need a studio, they just need a laptop.

- Royal is trying to enable the fan-artist relationship to be more of a partnership.

- When fans own a part of an artist’s song, they are tied for life.

- Justin has sold a ton of tickets in his career but he has zero idea of who those fans are and doesn’t have the ability to contact them. The data layer built into Royal helps artists connect with their fans.

- In the future, music labels will become much more competitive for artists than they have been in the past.