If you’re a musician, you’re probably familiar with the concept of royalties. In the traditional music industry, when a song is played on the radio or sold as a physical recording, the artist who created the song earns a royalty.

These payments are typically collected and distributed by a performing rights organization (PRO) such as ASCAP or BMI in the US, or SOCAN in Canada.

The Ethereum blockchain provides a new way to collect and distribute royalties using smart contracts. By creating a smart contract that includes royalty payments, musicians can ensure that they are paid every time their song is played or purchased.

This article will explain how to create a royalty smart contract on Ethereum.

Before we begin, it’s important to note that this article is for informational purposes only and is not intended as investment advice. The Ethereum blockchain is still in its early stages and smart contracts are subject to many risks, including bugs, hacking, and fraud.

Please do your own research before creating any smart contracts.

Creating a Smart Contract

The first step in creating a royalty smart contract is to define the terms of the contract. For our purposes, we’ll assume that the artist wants to be paid a royalty of $0.01 every time their song is played or purchased.

The contract will also need to specify who will be responsible for collecting and distributing the royalties. In most cases, this will be the artist themselves or their record label.

Once the terms of the contract have been defined, they can be encoded into a smart contract using the Solidity programming language. The code for our royalty contract would look something like this:

pragma solidity ^0.4.0;

contract MusicRoyalties {

address owner;

function MusicRoyalties() public {

owner = msg.sender;

}

function () public payable {

require(msg.value == 0.01 ether);

owner.transfer(msg .value);

}
}
This code defines a contract that allows someone to send $0 . 01 in ether to the owner of the contract . The contract will then transfer that amount to the owner’s account .
It’s important to note that anyone can send ether to this contract , regardless of whether or not they actually own the song .

For this reason , it’s important to have some way of ensuring that only authorized users can trigger the contract .
There are many ways to do this , but one common approach is to require that users sign each transaction with their private key . This can be done using Ethereum’s built -in ECDSA functionality :
contract MusicRoyalties {.

require(msg . value == 0 . 01 ether);

require(ecrecover ( msg . data , msg .

sigv , msg . sigh , msg . sigr ) == owner ); .

owner . transfer ( msg . value );

}
}
In this code , we’ve added a call to ecrecover which verifies that the signature on each transaction matches the owner’s address . This ensures that only transactions signed by the owner can trigger the contract .
Deploying and Using the Smart Contract
Once the smart contract has been written and tested , it needs to be deployed to the Ethereum network .

This can be done using any number of Ethereum clients , such as Geth or Parity .
Once deployed , anyone can interact with the smart contract by sending ether to its address . In our example , each time someone sends $0.