We sat down with Music Ally to have a chat about rightsHUB, present and future plans. See our recent feature with them below.
rightsHUB CEO Lee Morrison has nearly three decades of experience in distribution, starting from packing records in warehouses and taking in stops as Head of Digital at Skint/Loaded and as General Manager at Believe UK along the way.
He founded rightsHUB because "it became apparent that there was no tool on the market for rightsholders to run their day-to-day business. It's a back-end business solution."
Morrison says that people dealing with rights "spend way too much time on double-data-entry," and he believes rightsHUB is the "one point of data entry with multiple exit points" for anyone who needs to record, track and manage music rights data and assets, all in one place, from DIY artists to big distributors.
It's designed to be the space in which you do everything: updating all release and contract data, storing all imagery and social media assets, connecting the contact info of everyone associated with each release and once all this data is entered, things like issuing contracts and chasing payments can be done with one click.
For anyone used to the headache of navigating through a forest of Google documents, Excel spreadsheets, email archives and Dropboxes to find all these disparate pieces of information, it's clear how centralising everything in this way could be incredibly helpful.
But the really useful part is how the platform lets you use that data: it automatically checks and cleans up a catalogue's metadata and then sends it to all the companies that need it; it helps you track unpaid statements; creates promo landing pages; pulls in data from multiple sources to look for missed rights exploitation; and much more.
“I've made the platform scalable and accessible. I work with artists with so many releases on different labels, they have no idea when their statements are due or when their rights revert, so we help them and we scale all the way to the biggest distributor clients too.
How Does rightsHUB Work?
Initially a user will want to add as much of the important information as possible: adding in all their clients (like labels or artists) and the various users on a label team, with accompanying access rights to specific artists or clients. Access and user rights within the platform are multi-level and very fine-tuneable.
rightsHUB then holds all the detailed information about an artist's rights and all the vital associated clusters of information. Tabs along the side of the screen show where information can be entered: Contracts, Publishing, Content Manager, Connections and so on, plus something called "rightsTrack".
For instance, the Contracts tab can hold the fine details of each deal an artist is part of: breaking down the contractual information, including the type of contract, dates of expiration, profit share splits, territories, etc. Contracts can be issued, using templates populated with information pulled from this data and then emailed to all appropriate parties at the click of a button.
Content Manager centralises all of the various assets, artworks, audio files, hyperlinks, everything needed to be sent to musical recognition technology (MRT) companies and so on. A "PAGES" function can be used to automatically create a promo page for a new release, which can then be sent out to journalists, labels or playlist creators.
Metadata and Data-Checking
All the Media Enrichment and Description Standard (MEAD) information can also be added to a release: lyrics, composer data, tagging, ISRC, master-led Publishing info and custom fields. Keeping MEAD data up to date and closely linked to the music means artists can optimise their music for voice search.
Another feature called DataDoktor will sift through your catalogue's metadata to check if it fully fulfils the requirements to be supplied to, for instance, a partner. So if your catalogue contains ancient jpegs which are too small for modern platforms, you'll know exactly which ones need to be replaced.
Pricing and Future Development
“I'm building it for the masses. The reason I'm keeping it cheap is because I want anyone to be able to use it.
He's excited about developing rightsHUB into a multi-faceted, one-stop platform that serves everyone's needs: "I'm always open for ideas and am constantly learning from my clients. We'll keep developing it further and further."