Case Study

Real-time payment streaming with Alby Wallet APIs

• 4 min read
Real-time payment streaming with Alby Wallet APIs

Discover how Alby's Wallet APIs enable real-time audience-to-artist payments at music events, revolutionizing live performance monetization.

Phantom Power Music’s Mission and Objective

Phantom Power Music is a "Value 4 Value" artist focused music company that embraces a unique monetization model and philosophy. This approach enables fans to directly support artists whenever they enjoy a song or performance, without subscriptions or paywalls. The company’s mission is to educate artists and assist them in capturing full control over their revenue stream and eliminate gatekeepers such as labels, performance royalty organizations, distributors or streaming platforms. To achieve this, Phantom Power Music offers innovative services and tools to help artists regain control of publishing, master royalty collection and to collect instant earnings globally.

By leveraging this new ecosystem, Phantom Power Music helps ensure that artists retain complete ownership and financial autonomy over their music and intellectual property rights  so they can benefit from instant, global, direct payments with automated splits that include collaborators such as co-writers and producers.

Challenge

Historically, artists have had to wait weeks or months to be paid for streaming or live performance settlements but now artists can leverage the Bitcoin Lightning Network with low-cost, instant global settlement. In order to support the complicated financial arrangements and splits surrounding live music production, several challenges needed to be addressed to successfully integrate this technology:

  1. User-Friendly Payment Address: Ensuring participants using various Bitcoin Lightning wallets could effortlessly send payments directly to artists.
  2. Payment Management: An intuitive wallet interface for easy management of incoming payments.
  3. Programmatic Interaction: Ensuring programmatic interaction with the wallet without requiring expertise in bitcoin or lightning-specific code by Phantom Power Music.
  4. Full Control: Maintaining full control over the wallet to minimize risks associated with locked funds and ensure uninterrupted operations.

Solution

In collaboration with technology partner RSS Blue, Phantom Power Music developed an innovative approach that enables real-time, instant distribution of payments to artists and production staff during live events. Attendees at live events like Adam Curry’s Boostagram Ball Live from Austin TX are presented with a QR code on a large screen TV that, when scanned, allows the audience member  to send payments directly to a wallet managed by Phantom Power Music using Alby Hub. These payments are then automatically split and distributed instantly to the artist/band and the production crew's personal bitcoin wallets. Phantom Power Music and RSS Blue selected Alby Hub and its APIs for several key reasons:

  1. Lightning Addresses: Alby offers human-readable lightning addresses with widespread adoption across Bitcoin Lightning wallets, making it simple for users to send and receive payments. These addresses are customizable, allowing Phantom Power Music to tailor their offerings to fit their brand and user experience.
  2. Self-Custodial Wallet: Alby Hub provides a self-custodial wallet, enabling operators to interact directly with the bitcoin lightning network without relying on third-party custodians. This setup reduces the risk of locked funds and ensures continuous operations, all within an intuitive wallet interface.
  3. Comprehensive APIs and Webhooks: Alby offers powerful APIs, webhooks, and access tokens for seamless programmatic interaction with its wallet. With the support of RSS Blue, Phantom Power Music utilized these tools to set up webhooks for real-time notifications of incoming payments and access tokens to automate the process of splitting and distributing payments to artists efficiently.

Dovydas Joksas, CEO RSS Blue, summarized the collaboration: “Working with Phantom Power Music and Alby, RSS Blue created a service that allows listeners anywhere in the world to financially support music artists performing live. Alby offers easy-to-use API to monitor incoming payments and automatically split and forward them to both artists and supporting staff. In a world where artist payouts can take weeks to arrive, this alternative of instant and transparent payments is a game changer.” 

Outcome

Phantom Power Music and RSS Blue are offering artists an innovative way to generate income. During events such as Boostagram Ball the wallet interaction performs flawlessly, providing them the tools to receive, split and distribute payments automatically and instantly and eliminating the decades old problem of artists waiting weeks or months to receive settlement payments.  During the 4-hour Boostagram Ball event in Austin on December 16, 2024, they successfully streamed payments to artists and staff members, utilizing Alby Hub and Alby’s APIs:

Through our collaboration with Alby and RSS Blue, Phantom Power Music empowers artists, bands, and musicians with a groundbreaking way to transform the live concert experience. By enabling fans to seamlessly and instantly transfer value directly to the artist, we eliminate industry gatekeepers and return revenue control to the creators, said Julie Costello, Founder Phantom Power Music. “This innovation not only enhances financial independence for artists but also fosters deeper, more meaningful connections between performers and their audiences—creating a truly unique and impactful relationship." 

Remarks: Total value received only refers to the lightningislove@getalby.com lightning address. Payments distributed and number of recipients refer to RSS Blue’s real-time payment splitting activity.