Making life better for broadcasters and artists alike

Everyone is always looking for ways to reduce friction in their lives. Commercial and non-commercial broadcasters are no exception, especially when it comes to the tedium of reporting royalties. 

Poring over massive amounts of data (often including line items for mere pennies), making sure everything is accurate and you pay the right amount, navigating different territories, sending out reports on time – every single month – is, to put it bluntly, a labor-intensive time-suck. 

The explosion of digital channels has surely created tremendous opportunity – for artists to reach more people; for listeners to have more ways to enjoy great music; for businesses to facilitate those connections, and more. But that proliferation has exacerbated the headache of reporting too; more places to stream audio means more revenue, but it also leaves a lot more data to be wrangled. 

“Every rose has its thorn,” the great Bret Michaels of Poison once wrote.

So, forever in the name of simplifying audio, we’ve built in automated royalty reporting, starting with SoundExchange. You just set up your SoundExchange FTP connection, schedule your reports, verify them each month, and you’re done.

It’s the latest addition to SoundStack Insights, a single point of knowledge for digital audio publishers to understand how audiences are listening, if everything is streaming smoothly, what rights holders need to be paid, and more. 

It also uniquely unifies cross-channel analytics, so publishers can easily assess their live streaming and podcasting together, and make more informed decisions for their whole business. 

But back to the benefits of automation for a second. This is clearly about more than just webcasters saving time so they can hang out more with their family, or extend cocktail hour, or do whatever it is they do with more personal time. It’s about ensuring that creators can keep creating the amazing content that led us all here to begin with. 

Automated reporting is accurate. It diminishes potential human error, so musicians (or whoever else holds the rights) can be fully confident that all performances are being accounted for, and that they’re getting all of the revenue they have coming. And because those reports arrive automatically at the same time every month, artists can spend their time making music instead of waiting around for an accounting. 

To be clear, the power of more efficient royalty reporting isn’t revelatory – everyone across the market is well aware of it. But 1) it really matters. And 2) this isn’t about one efficiency, it’s about a unification of efficiencies. The addition of more easy-to-use tools in SoundStack – “layers on the stack,” if you will – makes life better for everyone by giving them a single point of access to everything they need to grow in audio.

“It’s getting better all the time,” the great Lennon and McCartney once wrote.

Ready for a look at SoundStack Insights? Contact us and we’ll walk you through.