The Orchard builds royalty processing platform

While the ink is still drying on Sony's full acquisition of The Orchard, set to be finalised at the end of this month, the independent music, film and video distribution company has big plans to build a royalty processing platform.

The Orchard announced it has acquired RoyaltyShare, Inc. a digital revenue managment company for the music and book industries, and has made a strategic investment in Korrect, a software company for royalty processing, metadata management, and sales analysis.

The two investments will offer its independent label clients like Frenchkiss Records (Bloc Party, Drowners, Les Savy Fav), Cleopatra Records (Queensrÿche, William Shatner), Nuclear Blast Records and Sesame Street, a new and advanced standalone platform for royalty processing. It will be available via The Orchard’s client dashboard, The Orchard Workstation and will integrate digital and physical sales data with all ancillary revenue (like concert revenue, merch sales, endorsement deals) through automated data sync.

RoyaltyShare, which was created in 2005, was the industry’s first Web-based platform to support revenue processing and master royalties for independent labels and distributors. It serves 90 independent labels and recently raised US$11.5 million in venture funding.

Steve Grady, CEO of RoyaltyShare said: “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.”

Korrect launched as a type of accounting software in 2001, it now supports consumption models such as Spotify and YouTube.

Simon Peters, Managing Director of Korrect said: “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.”

Brad Navin, CEO of The Orchard said: “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.”