Press Releases
RoyaltyShare Contact:
Steve Grady
President, COO
(858) 458-1600 ext. 11
steve@royaltyshare.com
 Editorial Contact:
Michael Kelly
Nadel Phelan
(831) 440-2403
michael@nadelphelan.com


RoyaltyShare to Deliver Industry First, Web-Based Royalty Processing and Reporting Solution

RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage Service Captures Digital Media Revenues and Provides Critical Insight into Digital Sales Channels

SAN DIEGO, Calif., Aug. 1, 2006 - RoyaltyShare, a premier provider of digital royalty solutions to the entertainment industry, today announced its formal company launch with a suite of Web-based services that provide end-to-end management of both mechanical and artist royalties. RoyaltyShare kicked off its product strategy with the general availability of RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage, an industry-first service for aggregating and monitoring digital sales data. The offering enables record labels and music distributors to consolidate, manage and interpret data from digital music and video revenue streams.

"As music fans increasingly turn to pay-per-download and subscription-based online music services, the worldwide market for IP-based music services is expected to reach $2.7 billion in 2009, representing over 8 percent of total worldwide music industry revenue," said Susan Kevorkian, program manager, IDC Consumer Markets: Audio. "Music labels equipped to capture and analyze online music sales data and to tailor their Internet distribution strategies accordingly will be best positioned to maximize the revenue potential of online music services over the long term."

With the advent of dozens of individual digital music providers selling music online and on mobile devices, record labels and music distributors are faced with managing an increasing volume of incoming sales data originating from disparate sources with no standard for reporting. The problem is compounded by the need to make sense of the data in order to accurately calculate and pay out royalties promptly when they become due or face costly audits and time-consuming friction from their partners and payees.

"Faced with billions of transactions, disparate data formats, and increasingly complex royalty splits, the modern music industry requires a modern data processing infrastructure," said RoyaltyShare Chairman and CEO Bob Kohn. Kohn was the co-founder of eMusic, the pioneering music download service, served as vice chairman of Borland Software Corp. (2000-2005), and is the co-author of the leading treatise on music industry contracts, 'Kohn On Music Licensing.' "RoyaltyShare has built a state-of-the-art, Web-accessible platform that provides our clients with a scalable means of processing revenue data and an efficient way of reporting royalties to recording artists and music publishers. By leveraging RoyaltyShare's Web-based royalty processing infrastructure, record labels can reliably fulfill their periodic royalty obligations, reduce costs, and better focus on their core competencies of A&R and marketing."

As part of today's announcement, the company detailed plans for a suite of services that address the needs of record labels and distributors:

  • RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage
  • RoyaltyShare Mechanical Royalty Service
  • RoyaltyShare Artist Royalty Service
"Existing legacy software and in-house solutions have not kept pace with the needs arising from the music industry's shift to digital distribution," said Steve Grady, RoyaltyShare President & COO. "RoyaltyShare's suite of services has been built from the ground up to specifically address the scalability needs and complexity of modern royalty processing. Labels access the RoyaltyShare service from an easy-to-use Web-browser interface and subscribe to it on a cost-effective basis."

"RoyaltyShare came along at just the right time," said Dan Harrington, co-founder and President of Dualtone Records, an independent record label in Nashville. "We're excited about digital distribution, but we quickly realized that our existing royalty processes were not well suited to dealing with digital sales. Using RoyaltyShare's back-end systems to manage the massive amount of sales data is enabling us to pursue new revenue streams and pay our publishers and artists accurately and on time."

RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage

As the first of a suite of Web-based offerings, RoyaltyShare today announced the general availability of its Digital Advantage Service. RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage simplifies the management of sales information from disparate sources. The service utilizes specially designed software adapters that allow for the easy import of sales data from all the major digital distribution retailers such as iTunes, Napster, eMusic, Rhapsody and many others. After uploading their data files into the Digital Advantage server with a standard Web-browser interface, customers can rely on the RoyaltyShare team to handle all aspects of collecting, managing and consolidating the incoming sales data.

The RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage service requires no investment in software, hardware, maintenance or upgrades. With flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing, RoyaltyShare's Web-based Digital Advantage platform presents consolidated sales data in a variety of familiar formats such as Excel and Tab delimited and can be customized for integration with existing third party royalty applications. In addition, Digital Advantage features a powerful, graphical reporting environment that allows customers to gain critical insight into their digital sales channels.

"The RoyaltyShare Digital Advantage service provides us with sophisticated account management tools that help us keep our labels on the pulse of who is buying their music, where they are buying it and how revenue royalties are to be distributed," said Michael Rosenberg, president of KOCH Entertainment Distribution. "Utilizing RoyaltyShare's infrastructure to manage our digital revenue streams has allowed to us to aggressively pursue new digital revenue partners and opportunities."

RoyaltyShare provides independent labels and distributors with access to high performance tools at an accessible price, leveling the playing field for digital distribution. The variable, month-to-month service fee model makes accurate data management a reality for labels and distributors of all sizes. No extended time commitment is required. No software, other than a Web browser, needs to be installed. No upfront or setup fees are charged. Clients are billed 1.5 percent of all royalty revenues processed.

Artist & Mechanical Royalty Services

To complete its product strategy, RoyaltyShare announced the forthcoming availability of its Artist and Mechanical Royalty Services, optimized for calculating and processing royalties for the digital world. Currently in beta-testing mode, these services will roll out to provide a turnkey solution for labels to pay out accurate royalties to artists and publishers.


About RoyaltyShare

RoyaltyShare is the worldwide leader in Web-based royalty processing and reporting solutions for the global entertainment industry. RoyaltyShare provides a suite of on-demand services dedicated to simplifying the increasingly complex and necessary task of managing sales and distribution information, calculating royalties, and generating Web-accessible royalty reports. RoyaltyShare's centralized revenue data processing solution supports digital, physical, subscription, mobile and other sources of revenue. Its state-of-the-art system and dedicated 24/7 royalty support team enables music labels, distributors and publishers to accurately manage royalty reporting obligations anytime, anywhere. For more information, please visit http://www.royaltyshare.com.