{"id":481825,"date":"2019-02-05T08:47:05","date_gmt":"2019-02-05T15:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=786154"},"modified":"2019-02-05T08:47:05","modified_gmt":"2019-02-05T15:47:05","slug":"a-music-startup-is-paying-artists-for-their-future-royalties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/a-music-startup-is-paying-artists-for-their-future-royalties\/","title":{"rendered":"A Music Startup Is Paying Artists For Their Future Royalties"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the music industry<\/a>, big advance payments are old hat: A new artist lands a hit and a bunch of labels rush over waving multi-million-dollar checks<\/a>\u00a0for his or her next album. But the high bets are often risky, and the cash only goes to a handful of names every year. Amuse, a Swedish music startup that bills itself as a reimagined record label, is aiming to ease both problems with its new royalties payment system.<\/p>\n

Called \u201cFast Forward,\u201d the program, unveiled Tuesday, uses machine learning coupled with Amuse\u2019s \u201cvast access to music consumption intelligence\u201d to crunch the numbers on precisely how much an artist or group stands to make in the next six months of their career \u2014 and then pays them for those future profits. According to the company, the system can automatically analyze more than 27 billion pieces of data,\u00a0such as streams of an artist\u2019s latest album, to figure out an individual\u2019s future royalties. Artists who use Fast Forward will be able to view and withdraw those future royalties from the Amuse app directly.<\/p>\n

\u201cMajors do royalty advances, but no one does it for smaller artists. There\u2019s no way for an indie artist to go into a meeting with a label and walk out with an advance,\u201d\u00a0Diego Farias, co-founder and CEO of the music company and a former executive at Warner Music Group, tells\u00a0Rolling Stone.\u00a0<\/em>\u201cFor everyone else, it\u2019s a completely new way to fund music. And the second part of this is that it\u2019s\u00a0built right into the experience of the company and app.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amuse, with Farias and a team of other industry figures including the Black Eyed Peas\u2019 will.i.am at the helm, came into the chaotic music-tech market in 2015 and quickly drew interest across the global business (not to mention millions in venture capital<\/a>) for its free music distribution service, which lets artists keep their royalties and rights and links up to major streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify. It expanded from Europe into the U.S. and Latin America last year, and has worked with thousands of artists on around 100,000 different projects.<\/p>\n

Amuse has caught investors\u2019 eyes because it essentially offers a dual business, with direct distribution and artist analytics on one side and a label-like A&R service on the other: When an artist\u2019s self-uploaded music shows promise, the record label portion of the company comes in with the offer of a 50\/50 licensing deal. While competitors like CD Baby and Tunecore also offer fledging artists free distribution, Amuse specifically calls itself a label more than a service.<\/p>\n

Fast Forward \u2014 which will roll out to artists around the globe this spring \u2014 was developed after people brought up the idea of data-based royalties projection at a town hall several months ago, Farias says, but it\u2019s existed as an \u201cearly sketch\u201d within the company for two years. \u201cThe\u00a0system around royalties is so fundamentally broken,\u201d he says. \u201cThere are pain points in the market around very basic things.\u201d (Initial eligibility depends on the amount of data in the artist\u2019s release history.)<\/p>\n

Like with a traditional label advance, artists who don\u2019t actually end up making the money they\u2019re given will have to pay it back; but Farias points out that being able to have future funds forwarded is the opposite of what many smaller artists currently experience, which is months of delayed payments for already-earned royalties as various distribution services, tech companies and collection agencies maneuver the current financial framework.<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the music industry, big advance payments are old hat: A new artist lands a hit and a bunch of labels rush over waving multi-million-dollar checks\u00a0for his or her next album. But the high bets are often risky, and the cash only goes to a handful of names every year. Amuse, a Swedish music startup […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-481825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-13 15:19:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=481825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/481825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=481825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=481825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=481825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}