Music Small Business Consulting
The longer I've helped artists, studios, and labels with tracking their catalogs and income, the more I've realized that many aren't maximizing the benefits of their hard-earned work.
This happens for a lot of reasons, from the benign (too busy hustling and creating to deal with all the administration), to the annoying (too many catalog-related registrations and other intricacies to track), to the troubling (well-meaning entertainment lawyers and accountants whose practices aren't nimble enough to unravel idiosyncratic problems before racking up too many billed hours).
Consequently, whenever a studio, artist, or label client initially hires me, I've found inefficiencies and errors that are the natural result of music-speak and business-speak getting lost in translation, and I end up working closely with the clients to identify and manage the peculiarities inherent in making their catalogs as profitable as they can be.
As a consultant, that is what I offer: peace of mind. An ally who gets this stuff and is on your side, who can patiently walk you through things and help you make decisions, or just chime in as needed. Everything we do as musicians has value, even if it's not immediately apparent; let's capitalize on it.
Business Strategy and Consulting
- Translating “music-speak” into “business-speak” for lawyers, tax accountants, and other contracted white-collar professionals
- Using on-the-ground experience to provide contracted professionals with the necessary music-related context to efficiently handle idiosyncratic situations
- Negotiating and editing contracts, rates, agreements, and fees, directly or in tandem with legal counsel, with labels, publishers, artist management, collaborators, contracted professionals, utility companies, and insurers
- Interfacing with banks, payroll, insurers, compliance
Royalty Processing
- Using proprietary systems and advanced software to comb through aggregator statements and provide easily digestible results as well as concise reports on amounts owed to collaborators and management
- Sharing proprietary “Royalty Map” with clients to help them take stock of different royalty streams and whether they are being collected
- Aiding clients with complicated publishing arrangements, especially between different entitled parties with dissimilar claims, parent/subsidiary companies, and non-entitled parties who have nonetheless been paid by mistake
- Assignment of royalties to a partnership or corporation, including both arrangement of deal and subsequent processing
Bookkeeping
- Budgeting, financial analysis and planning, and reports
- Familiarity with tax-based and GAAP accounting
- Invoicing, receiving payments, client interface
- Reconciling and reviewing bank and credit statements
- Arranging guaranteed payments and distributions for equity holders, including within complex parent/subsidiary structures
- Tour accounting, both on the road and remote
- Capital investment, shareholder loan, fixed asset and equity planning
- Administering publishing splits, master ownership, territories and distribution, contracts for entitled parties, royalty payment waterfalls, licenses, guest artists, remixes, metadata coordination
- PRO registry and management, including royalty tracking and dispute resolution (needed often when publishers change)
- Coordinating master-side and publishing-side registrations and administration contracts to make sure all royalties are accounted for (HFA, SoundExchange, etc.)
- Registry and maintenance with copyright office
catalog management
- Marketability consulting, with regard to project narrative, image, written copy, social media presence, “vibe”
- Coordinating the above with artist management, PR firms, other promotion
- USPTO registry