Kobalt has done it again: The company has duplicated the data portal it designed for its songwriters, allowing them to see every economic transaction that occurs with their music worldwide.
According to Kobalt’s website, the Portal offers labels, managers and artists powerful reporting and user-friendly analysis tools which will make it easy to review and understand all their varied income streams.
According to one prominent manager that has used the Kobalt portal, it is a unique, very transparent reporting tool for the label side of the business, where these types data and services are routinely offered to labels from distributors, but are not yet available at the more granular artist level.
The Kobalt Label Services Portal offers the ability to drill down on revenue streams for each artist, offering weekly (and sometimes daily) snapshots of activity at digital services around the world on a market-by-market basis, as well as information on physical product.
For example, on YouTube artists can monitor every video with their music in it, including even outside user-generated ones, showing total views of assets, monetized and not. The info is updated daily, with a seven-day delay due to when the data is reported. In the income analysis section of the portal, the artist can then see income from each video viewed on YouTube, by territory.
Artists and their managers can also see income by specific release, by type of product (streams, downloads, bundles, etc.) and from which digital services and which geographic market they originate. In this way, artists can not only track new releases, but they can also see how their catalog is performing around the globe.
In another first, the portfolio also compiles all master recordings’ synch licensing opportunities currently in development in markets around the world, viewable by each stage in the licensing process — from negotiations through the deal closings — and how much income each synch will bring in. The Portal also tracks neighboring rights income from around the world.
Finally, since artists using Kobalt Label Services typically own their masters that are marketed and distributed by the company, Kobalt fulfills all mechanical licensing obligations for both the digital and physical sales worldwide, including quarterly processing and payment of royalties to collections societies and publishers, according to the company’s website.
[Billboard]Taken together, the portal and the services that Kobalt provides around it shows the company’s commitment to transparency once again, a prominent artist manager told Billboard.
