Automated Royalties Management

This article covers:

• What are Music Royalties?
• How are royalties automatically managed?
• What are royalty splits?
• Benefits of automated royalty splits
• Automate Royalties with Sonomo

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Music royalties are a crucial source of income for artists, composers, and labels. However, managing royalties can be a complex and time-consuming process. Fortunately, there are quality distribution services that can help manage royalties. Sonomo is one of the major distribution platforms to provide automatic royalty accounting. Unlike other major distribution services, Sonomo doesn’t charge labels or artists for using this service nor does it take a percentage fee out of the distributed royalties.

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Automated music royalties management systems use predetermined royalty splits to calculate how much each rights holder is owed for a particular stream or usage of a song and distributes royalties revenue accordingly. For example, if a song is streamed 100 times on Spotify, the system would use the predetermined royalty splits to calculate how much the songwriter, publisher, and owner of the sound recording are owed for each stream and distributes the revenue coming from these royalties according to these ownership percentages.

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Royalty splits are the percentages of revenue that are paid to different parties involved in the creation and distribution of a song or album. For example, a typical royalty split might be 50% to the artist, 25% to the composer, and 25% to the label.

Determining the correct royalty splits is essential to ensure that everyone involved in the creation and distribution of music is fairly compensated. However, this can be a difficult and confusing process, especially for independent artists who may not have the resources or expertise to manage their own royalties.

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There are many benefits to using automated royalty splits for artists, composers, and labels:

• Fair compensation: Automated royalty splits ensure that everyone involved in the creation and distribution of music is fairly compensated, based on their contributions.
• Transparency: Automated royalty splits provide transparency into how revenue is being allocated, which can help to build trust and strengthen relationships between artists, composers, and labels.
• Time-saving: Automated royalty splits save time by streamlining the process of managing royalties. This frees up time for artists and labels to focus on other aspects of their careers and businesses.
• Cost-saving: Automated royalty splits reduce the cost of managing royalties by eliminating the need for manual calculations and reducing the risk of errors.
• Flexibility: Automated royalty splits can be customized to meet the specific needs of different artists, composers, and labels. This allows for greater flexibility and adaptability in managing royalties.

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Sonomo's royalties management system automatically calculates what every rights owner is entitled to receive in streaming royalties, distributes these royalties to them, and provides them with a web portal that they can use to view, track, and withdraw their royalties as they see fit. Sonomo's Royalties Dashboard provides extensive analytics on royalties sources, upcoming royalties, and historical payouts. What's really powerful about Sonomo's system is that once a label sets up royalty splits, they never have to worry about royalties ever again. Sonomo will automatically email rights owners, have them sign up, split the royalties according to their ownership percentage, and allow them to withdraw. All this happens without a label having to input anything past the initial royalty splits setup.

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For more information about our distribution product and plans and how labels use our services to automate their back office workload, check the linked page below.