Music Royalty Processing

For years, I have had this insane idea NOT to integrate accounting into royalty management (half a music catalogue management software). Then, a couple of years ago, I added royalty processing to the free open-source catalogue management solution called DMP.

Now, I will not go into details in this article, just watch the video linked above. What I want to talk about is what the mainstream (mis-)belief is about royalty management for music publishers.

How do I know it is a mainstream? Because many of the "royalty management solution" companies have been contacting me abou helping them with adding registrations on top of their existing systems.

Also, accounting companies ask me if I can help them with royalty processing. I can, sure, but the right way to do it is for the publishers to do specialised royalty a huge royalty statement themselves, and pass the data to the accountants in a form suitable for any generic accounting software.

I know, I know, sounds like science fiction. Except that it works. And for small original-only publishers for free. Well, they still have to do some pivot table stuff in Excel or any free alternative.

And because I did release the code as open-source, the principles are in the open already. And because DMP can be deployed to a free cloud account without any technical skills, anyone can test it. And because there is a near 100% test coverage for DMP, the code repository has test files for data import, acknowledgement imports and 200.000 row royalty statement.

So, the gist of it is. You register using CWR. You import ACKknowledgement files, and with then you import society work codes. Royalty statements contain society work codes, and sometimes even your own work code (UNISON is a great example here). For every record in a royalty statement, the work in yoru database is found by using this code. No complex semi-manual matching is required. The parties and splits are taken form the database, simple calculation si performed and the result is a similar file to the incoming, just with a lot of additional information. Then you import this data into Excel and use pivot tables for generating statements. You can create a custom Excel template once, and then you will have the process fully automatised.

This is how we do it in DMP's large commercial sibling That Green Thing.