download stores and digital labels
ReporterReporter is based on the compression techniques of our Compressor software. Its extened funtionality manages typical contracts of the digital music business and creates detailed distribution / royalty statements in Excel and PDF format that are send out via the built-in email engine. Available in March 2012 as stand-alone software, starting at 1400 EUR, or bundled with your brand new digital distribution services, powered by Danmark Digital.
Target Audience
Reporter was developed by OFFICER solutions for modern entertainment companies that do digital sales only. These companies can not be clearly defined as aggregators, labels, download stores or any other classic business of the past 10 years. Fundamentally, these companies have to differ from old concepts and from one another, as this represents their right to exist. Their principles of generating income is manifold, but they all share a commen asset: digital music.
Reporter helps these businesses in managing the complex part of their activity: Managing many right owners, their catalog, thousands of sales lines and the creation of royalty statements.
What it does
Reporter comes with a catalog engine that can be built easily by just importing existing meta data sheets. The goal is to provide basic information about releases, EANs/UPCs/, Tracks, ISRCs, etc. for identification reasons. But we also included an ISRC and EANUPC generator for your convenience. Please understand, that this is not a meta data tool to hold all information about tracks and releases, but a specialized catalog tool that enables the system to identify products and tracks in your sales reports.
DSPs and download stores are managed in a separate area where you can set the preferences for each DSP: Country, Currency, Download Type, Compression Level.
Right holders (licensors) have their own space, where you can manage their contract information like the address, shares, recurring fees, etc. An account overview manages all balances and payments to the right holders.
The import tool can import sales from all sources in all currencies, as it relies on the world wide standards of EAN/UPC/GrID/ISRC. During the import all sales lines are compressed with the method you chose for every DSP.
A reporting tool allows for a visual overview of your sales and product performance per DSP and territory.
Finally, compressed sales can be turned into meaningful royalty statements in PDF and Excel format. These statements can be send out via the built-in email engine in a fully automated way. The resulting statements are appropriate for further processing, as needed by professional businesses, like record labels.
About the royalty engine / Comparing Reporter with a full royalty system
Compared to our Royalty Producer software, which represents a full blown royalty system, the royalty engine of Reporter is focussed on the conditions that a digital mass distribution implies. It leaves out a lot of complexity that a real record label has to respect, but is not needed in a pure digital business. This results in a easier to use interface and an extremely low and fast learning curve. The contract system is still very powerful, but focussed and therefore easier to use:
• every licensor (right holder) has one contract. (while a record label may sign multiple contracts for mutiple releases with the same licensor)
• all income per licensor is sum up. (while a record label can plunge into complex cross-colateralization issues)
• tracks can have one or more contracts, enabling the user to handle producer/artist or band member legal relationsships
• contracts allow the calculation of royalties based on revenue (percentage) in up to 4 stages. Different shares are possible for separate territories, downloa types and sales channels.
• contracts are used to define one time deductions or recurring deductable costs, like a distribution fee (percentage) or unit fees per release/tracks.
• income from recording rights is separated from mechanicals/publishing income as occuring in new iTunes cloud and Goolge/youtube statements.
• withheld tax reporting can be switched on and the calcualted withheld tax can be reported to right owners.
Bulit-in access to Danmark Digital
Users who are opting for our brand new digital distribution services can access their accounts / dashboards at Danmark Digital directly from inside Reporter.
About sales reports and compression
Even when great standards, like DDEX are defined and evolving, the real world of sales reports in the music industry is all but standardized. The only standards we all can rely on are EAN/UPC/ISRC, as even the GrID is used only by a handful of players. Compressor comes with import functions for some of the bigger players like iTunes, the main power of this software lies in its flexibility, as you can adapt the import function to the structure of the sales files you get in. The system also understands the new structure of reports coming from the iTunes Cloud Sales and Youtube, where you basically get a list of tracks and products and a total, representing your revenue and, when applicable mechanical (publishing) income.
The compression level you can set is limited more by legal considerations, than technical ones. Some labels may be able to ignore particular information like download stores, content type or even territory. The more information you can afford to let go, the higher the compression level will be. But even when keeping all information, the compression levels are remarkable and allow you to further process sales more easily.
Reporter will be available in February 2012 as stand-alone software, starting at 1400 EUR, or bundled with our brand new digital distribution services, powered by Danmark Digital.
