Music and movie distribution company The Orchard – itself fresh from being fully acquired by Sony Music – has bought San Diego-based royalty processing company RoyaltyShare Inc.
In a clear bid to make its royalty operation for clients more competitive, The Orchard has also made a ‘strategic investment’ in RoyaltyShare rival Korrect.
The resultant combined recorded music royalty processing operation will form a standalone system accessible to all Orchard clients through the company’s user-facing dashboard.
The Orchard promises this new platform will “seamlessly integrate digital and physical sales data with all ancillary revenue, relieving the burden of processing artist statements and facilitating transparency in artist accounting”.
Sony has pledged to allow The Orchard to continue to operate separately from the major label group, which paid US $200m to acquire the remaining half of the company in a deal expected to be approved at the end of March.
“We created RoyaltyShare in 2005 when we realized the inherent difficulties faced by independent labels in transitioning to a digital world,” explains Steve Grady, CEO of RoyaltyShare.
“The challenges of royalty accounting have grown by magnitudes over the past decade. Our goal is to minimize the pain points around the business of running an independent label and, in The Orchard and Korrect, we’ve found partners who share the same ethos.”
RoyaltyShare’s RPS platform supports more than 90 customers including some of the world’s largest independent labels as well as advanced digital sales processing for large book publishers with its Digital Advantage solution.
Korrect began in 2001 as accounting software that quickly evolved to support the shift from discrete unit transactions to consumption models such as Spotify and YouTube.
Simon Peters, Managing Director of Korrect adds, “We see it as an excellent opportunity to integrate with the industry’s leading digital distributor, The Orchard. RoyaltyShare and Korrect share goals to extend our solutions to record labels of all sizes. We are excited to collaborate with like-minded businesses to build upon the next-generation, best-in-breed royalty processing system.”
“We’re always looking for ways to free up our clients time to allow them to focus on the creative side of their businesses, whether it’s through performance rights collections, sales and marketing, or premium video services,” says Brad Navin, CEO of The Orchard. “Artist royalty processing is a natural extension of our end-to-end solution, particularly as it follows our philosophy of providing complete transparency from point of purchase to artist payment.”
This year, The Orchard has also acquired Blind Pig Records and signed a strategic partnership with German services company Membram.Music Business Worldwide
