A leading Northwest indie label, Kill Rock Stars (KRS), emerged from humble beginnings in 1991, working with local spoken word artists, such as Kathleen Hanna, and releasing small runs of its recordings on 7" vinyl.

At the time when Slim Moon founded the label, his next-door neighbor was Kurt Cobain and the Northwest music scene was beginning to thrive with new talent and a new type of sound that the world would soon embrace as Grunge. The stars aligned for KRS when Slim released the label’s very first compilation album, which included a song by Nirvana and came out just weeks after the album "Nevermind". The commercial success of the LP enabled Slim to quit his day job and focus on building KRS into what is today… a cornerstone of the Northwest music scene, with a reputation as a queer-friendly, feminist-friendly and artist-friendly label.

Back in these early days when KRS only had a few artists on its roster, Slim managed all the royalty accounting himself, using only pen and paper. As an artist-centric label, KRS has always seen paying their artists fair royalties in a timely manner as a top priority. As the label grew, Slim’s pen and paper accounting methods couldn’t keep up with the number of artists and quantity of royalties he had to process.

At this point, Slim reached out to a local Olympia web-designer and friend, Aaron Tuller, to develop a slightly more automated system for managing royalties using spreadsheets. His process was accurate, but required significant time and effort on a monthly basis to manually track all sales and payments over the life of a project, resulting in a 30 to 40 page spread sheet for each artist. As the label continued to grow, successfully developing marquis talent such as Elliott Smith, the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney and Bikini Kill, it became near impossible for Aaron to crunch numbers for hundreds of artists each quarter.

KRS was first exposed to RoyaltyShare in 2005 at SXSW and Midem. Despite some initial hesitation around abandoning their in-house royalty system, KRS recognized that they were in need of a comprehensive, scalable royalty management solution, and RoyaltyShare could provide just what they were looking for.

"Prior to working with RoyaltyShare, our royalty processing procedures were a bit of a wreck, with disparate spreadsheets that required a huge time sink each royalty period," said Portia Sabin, President of Kill Rock Stars. "RoyaltyShare’s automated system has greatly reduced our organizational overhead, as well as expenses, because we no longer have to maintain a salaried contractor to come up with complicated 30 to 40 page spread sheets."

"We have been really impressed with the service that RoyaltyShare provides and our artists love getting the RoyaltyShare statements," Sabin added. "Anytime there is an issue, the RoyaltyShare team rushes to find a solution, and improve the product. Ease of use, a great interface and a very intuitive design combine to make RoyaltyShare an ideal solution for Kill Rock Stars. Compared with the complicated 30 page documents we used to deal with, our new five-page statements result in less confusion and questions from artists. It would be foolish not to take advantage of the advanced technologies and solutions that the digital age offers."