Why Every Music Artist Needs Independent Royalty Accounting

With Augur CPA, you can get consultations based on current income sources, establishing realistic future goals to keep you moving forward. We work with leading attorneys, managers, and business advisors in the entertainment business to recover the full amounts contractually owed to the artists and IP rights owners. OneUp is the least popular accounting software on this list, competing with giants like QuickBooks. What makes it better than these giants is the built-in automation tools alongside inexpensive processes. Typically, these two features don’t go hand-in-hand, which makes it an attractive option.

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At the same time, ongoing advocacy for industry transparency, artist rights, and legislative reform must remain a priority. Governments, collection societies, digital service providers, and major labels all have a role to play in building a more equitable future. From advocating for user-centric payment models to reforming outdated licensing structures, collective action is required to fix the systemic imbalances that often disadvantage independent and emerging artists. Beyond backend technology, innovations are also reshaping the artist interface.

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• He has been the CFO or controller of both small and medium sized companies and has run small businesses of his own.
• Now Stem is debuting Royalty Services, which aims to distill labyrinthine Excel spreadsheets into digestible dashboards and will be available to labels outside of Stem’s distribution network.
• This means the expense is recognized in the period the underlying sales or usage occurs, not when the cash payment is made.
• Thanks to regular and thorough customer care, we have been able to adapt the platform to our needs.
• Proposed changes include legislating minimum per-stream rates, improving metadata accuracy to ensure proper tracking, and encouraging platforms to adopt more transparent royalty reporting systems.

There are also fewer integrations than other platforms, which can be a headache if you want to automate features from third-party software. But OneUp makes up for this by offering automated bank tracking and inexpensive music industry accounting pricing. While it’s easy to use, it lacks the same automation you might have come to expect from QuickBooks. It also lacks advanced accounting features, which are helpful as your musical organization scales onto bigger things. You can use the time tracking features if you hire staff to help your business.

Processing Revenue Data

• With our new built-in invoicing and payment automation, music royalty accounting has just gotten easier.
• Governments, collection societies, digital service providers, and major labels all have a role to play in building a more equitable future.
• Distribution formulas can vary between PROs, but they generally take into account the duration of use, time of broadcast, territory, and platform type.
• The support team has been very helpful and has really taken the time to make sure that the service meets our every need.
• It does this by offering solutions for self-employed individuals through QuickBooks Self Employed.

Benchmark artists and releases while evaluating your ROI with our comprehensive music royalty accounting software. You don’t need to be a stadium-filling artist to benefit from independent royalty accounting. In fact, indie and mid-level artists often lose the highest percentage of income to untracked royalties because they don’t have the in-house teams that major-label stars do. Fully manage your contract terms.Create beautiful and informative royalty statements. We learned about the large amount of data that is processed by record labels, so a tool that can process this data is key to any record label. The platform will need to be flexible enough to automatically deal with the multiple different statement formats a record label may have to deal with as it earns revenue from multiple different sources.

In academic institutions, churches, schools, and musical conservatories, print royalties continue to provide a stable source of income, especially for composers of classical or liturgical works. Print royalties are earned from the sale or licensing of printed sheet music, guitar tablatures, choral arrangements, and other notated versions of a musical composition. While they represent a smaller portion of total royalty revenue in the digital age, they remain important in educational, classical, and worship music contexts. We work closely with recording artists and others in the music industry through every financial and tax aspect of their music career.

A good royalty platform is built on modern technology that scales well with the vast (and increasingly growing) amount of data that needs to be processed. Machine learning models can analyze complex data patterns, predict royalty trends, and identify anomalies in royalty distributions that might indicate errors or fraud. These insights help rights organizations and music platforms fine-tune their operations, reduce administrative overhead, and ensure that more revenue reaches creators without leakage through inefficient systems. A major source of frustration for artists and rights holders is the lack of transparency in how royalties are calculated and distributed. As a result, rights holders are often left in the dark about the true value of their works in the marketplace. On average, Spotify pays between $0.003 to $0.005 per stream, and other platforms offer comparable or slightly higher rates.

Royalties 101 – Publishing

This project-based approach enables users to segment financial transactions into different groups. This helps music business owners save time when needing to review detailed data. Zoho’s more advanced plans provide users with better customer support (through email, voice, and chat), up to 10 custom reports, and the ability to track sales tax (which is great for merch sales). But what draws users to consider Zoho is its network of internal integrations. Zoho’s CRM, help desk, and email support is ideal for a wide range of small businesses. The optional Zoho Invoice tool excels in time management and invoice setup, facilitating quick payments and effective client communication.

This problem disproportionately affects independent and lesser-known artists, whose songs may be underrepresented or incorrectly cataloged in automated tracking systems. Streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music generate extensive usage reports containing metadata such as song titles, artist names, and play counts. These are submitted to collection agencies and are Remote Bookkeeping critical for determining how royalties are ultimately allocated.

“We were working with major artists who realized they had no visibility into when they were going to get paid and how unrecouped they were,” she recalls. At cash flow eddy.app, we’re on a mission to undo the chaos of music royalty accounting. Eddy.app turned out to be an ergonomic solution for processing our sales and creating royalty statements. Thanks to regular and thorough customer care, we have been able to adapt the platform to our needs.