Delivering Royalty Statements Electronically

I was reading “Publishers Contemplate Electronic Royalty Distribution” where Rachel Deahl was commenting on how most publishing houses still handle royalties the old fashioned way.

For some time I have been waxing lyrical on this topic, trying to persuade the Record industry that it is time to embrace the concept of paperless society. It is very refreshing to hear Rachel’s views, and see that the problem is also prevalent in Publishing.
 
Distributing statements digitally has numerous business benefits – some of the most obvious being the cost savings in postage, paper, printing, and the manpower to collate the statements, with a side benefit of the ability to say you are “going green”. However, I would say that we need to consider the approach very carefully. Going digital by simply emailing statements only takes you part of the way and means the Publisher will miss out on massive opportunities, especially the opportunity to improve transparency to its authors, add value, improve author relations, speed up communication, and even streamline the statement process.
 
Using a web portal for Authors will add far more value than simply emailing a PDF / scanned statement, or even an excel file. Authors are vital to the success of the Publisher so taking steps to provide them with an impressive portal through which they can view and interact with their statements will certainly add value. Functionality that makes sense would be the provision of statement summaries, drill down to a lower level, payment detail and history, download of raw data files (excel), and broadcast messaging. Real opportunity then lies in the ability to use this as the base to provide massive additional value, such as industry trends, product sales data (instead of just royalty information) – functionality that would help the Publisher by enabling authors to update their own information reducing the burden on the Publisher. Clearly all this functionality has to have the required controls and security, but none of this is new – we all encounter this every day with our online banking, our grocery stores online orders, purchases from Amazon and other online stores. This is the digital age, why don’t we embrace it? Why does the industry fear the challenges that have been overcome already?
 
Taking the opportunity to give this degree of visibility will be well received by authors as a significant attempt by the publisher to improve transparency. As the publisher moves to electronic payments coupled with digital statements, they will find themselves far more efficient and streamlined, and in a much better position to cope with the demands of the stressful statement deadlines. Imagine the comfort of knowing that systems can automatically verify that payment and statements match, control when statements are available on the web, and allow the company to retract them if there is a need, and know who has viewed their statements.
 
Over the last 18 months we have been working with a major Record company to create an Online Artist Portal such as the above, which is due to go live in the next 2 months. Watch this space – very soon you will see a Portal giving Artists, Producers and Management companies access to statement summary, drilldown to detail, payment history, and even downloads to raw data. This is definitely something that the wider industry needs to embrace very soon. Although change is always difficult, this particular change will deliver huge benefit and improvement in relations. It is very encouraging to hear how excited the labels are to have this functionality, and how interested they are in providing the best possible service to their artists.