Tone makes royalty processing simple for modern record labels.
Music has always been a catalyst for innovation, driving the culture of sound, style, streaming, and social media. It makes no sense that, when it comes to getting paid for music, the industry is decades out of date. Tone is here to fix this problem.
Tone makes royalty processing simple for modern record labels. Tone ingests all sales and cost data, calculates royalties accurately and quickly, and enables one-click payments for entire rosters. Labels can uncover actionable business insights via Tone’s dashboards. Artists can login to their own portal to understand and manage their finances.
Shai Goodman, who was a Tone user at 3LAU’s record label Blume, explains what working with royalties was like before the platform: “We would get the statement and then do the rest ourselves,” she says. “We would email X person who wrote on X track and say, ‘Here’s what we owe you. Please send us an invoice and we’ll pay it.’ We did that twice a year and it definitely took a long time. Many hours in Google spreadsheets, making sure everything was right.”
For an independent label with a three-person staff, it was a challenge. “To pay people on time and accurately, we needed an easier, more streamlined way to do our royalties,” says Shai.
They weren’t the only ones. Fool’s Gold, a classic New York City label that just celebrated its 15th anniversary, also had royalties headaches. “Our label has fifteen years of data. That’s the biggest nightmare with royalties,” says Jorge Mejias, Fool’s Gold’s CFO.
When artists and managers contact him about records released years ago, “it’s out of the blue,” he says. “It’s urgent. I have to drop everything and look through so many systems that exist across so many distributors. Trying to piece all of those together, source the original files, and make a timeline can be a nightmare. It just derails my whole day.”
These issues are why Blume and Fool’s Gold turned to Tone. “It’s incredibly helpful,” said Shai. “As opposed to keeping track of everything ourselves, it’s an automated system that tells us, ‘Your H2 2022 mechanicals are ready to review.’ You don’t need a deep understanding of accounting. It’s so easy and it looks so clean, an intern could use it.”
Fool’s Gold’s Label Manager Nathaniel Heller agrees. “We could bring our system into the modern era. It’s all streamlined. Now, Jorge (Fool’s Gold’s CFO) can do things that are actually good for his mental health.”
