Unraveling the chaos of the royalty system
For decades the entire royalty system has become increasingly complex, tedious, and difficult for artists and labels to decipher or audit. A long-time colleague of mine, Bob Kohn ( a very successful serial entrepreneur, attorney, & author of the BIBLE of legal issues in the music world -- "Music Licensing"), has launched a new venture called Royalty Share to address this dilemma -- and hopefully take the pain out fo the process through effective sales data consolidation and simplified royalty reporting.
The royalty 'dilemma' plagues not only the music industry, but motion picture studios and book publishers as well. Royalty Share has come up with a customizable web-based service that will enable labels, studios, and publishers to outsource this critical function in order to replace legacy software and homegrown royalty tracking systems that can't communicate with other systems effectively. A solution whose time has come (in fact is long overdue!). If anyone can crack the code on this, it's Bob Kohn!
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To jump on the Band Wagon of those below, I think the 9thx thing might actually be the way to go. The music/movie/media industry and pretty much every other online sales engine will eventually head towards an Ebay model for sale. As distribution channels change, the security of those channels will depend upon some inherent currency inherent to the files themselves. The record exchanges and CD buy backs of my college years can be turned into digital buy backs and exchanges, as DRM allows for secure transfer of ownership of an online file. For the first time though, the artists and the industry that package them will be able to track and even gain a royalty on that resale. It sounds cool at least.
This has been done already. I was in Los Angeles two weeks ago and met some folks who did this 2 years ago....they acuatlly have a consumer facing application that can probably work with Bob's stuff. I have his card, www.9thXchange.com. These two guys should probably team up and solve this problem once and for all.
Nico
Legacy Royalties - The 9thXchange has this...they just launched.
A champion for artists and the consumer - buy, sell, make money for music and videos. It's simple..it's the answer and just a matter of time before it takes off.
And yes I know the guys who made this cool application. www.9thx.com