Challenge

Pickathon is a world-class creator of audio and video content and it costs them a lot of time, energy and money to film, edit, record, mix, package and release or distribute content. Artists put their hearts and souls into their performances, and at the end of the day, they want to share their art with the world, and they need to be paid for it. The world of music rights can be very complicated. Artists can be independent or on a label. There are often many layers of management, all with rights to any and all releases. Different band members are entitled to different percentages and there are often guest musicians that play with bands at festivals. The administrative overhead in recording and releasing with a festival, is just too much for most management to commit to.

Solution

Working with artists and the festival producers, we designed a web app that allows artist management to view each potential release and assign payment parameters to every person. Once each person digitally approves their percentage and the quality of the performance, it is set to be released, based on the agreement between the festival and the artist. All parties can log in at any time to see the total sales/views and how much money that translates to for them. Payments are automatically distributed once a quarter. The artists have loved this tool because it gives them greater control over monitoring their content and we’re able to make percentages more favorable for the artists than is the norm.