Royalties are payments made against the usage of a piece of copyrighted content. In general these are associated with musicians, who received royalties for the purchase of their content (and was usually put towards the advance payment that a record label had given the artist up front). The issue with legacy royalties was the inconsistent and sometimes illegal (or at least unfair) accounting of those royalties, leading artists to be bound to debts with their record label. Royalties on the blockchain, via smart contracts, can alleviate these issues.
When you set up an NFT on GrandStation, you have the ability to add a royalty percentage for purchases of your items *in perpetuity*. That last part is important, because for every sale of the NFT the artist (you) would continue to receive the royalty percentage whenever a sale occurs.
The reason that blockchain smart contact royalties are more reliable, is because in order to honor the contact and complete the transaction on the blockchain, the contract “terms” need to be enforced or else it will fail.
One of the key points for enabling royalties in a smart contract is that they need to be paid in crypto to a wallet address. In GrandStation we allow you to add a wallet address and royalty percentage for each NFT you create, meaning you can set up different royalty wallets and percentages for your various NFTs.
As you can see, when smart contracts do the calculations and payments of royalties, it takes out any potential human error (or malicious intent). Artists get guaranteed income from the resale of their works. More importantly, the contract is enforced on the blockchain, so whether the resale happens on GrandStation or through another provider, the royalty is always paid to the wallet address, because it has to be in order for the contact to be executed.
We think this is a tremendous benefit to artists and we look forward to developing the artist community with more features that enable them to profit from their hard work.