Synchtank is unveiling its latest platform to its software suite, IRIS. It promises to change the game of royalty accounting and unlock real value for rights holders and rights administrators—and for anyone considering investing in publishing.

IRIS (International Repertoire Information System) can transform tedious, time-sucking tasks that can take days into the work of mere hours, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs. IRIS helps organisations devote more time to value-add tasks than reports and repetitive data inputting. It’s the kind of large-scale, secure, smart innovation the industry expects from a media and music enterprise software platform that counts many of the biggest media conglomerates in the world as clients. The system was originally developed by global independent music publisher, peermusic.

“Synchtank has a strong track record of changing the way technology is used in the music, movie and media businesses,” said Chris Cass, Synchtank’s Chief Business Officer. “We realized there was a gap in the market for high-performance royalty systems in this increasingly data-driven and complex environment. We discovered that peermusic had developed a system for their 30 worldwide offices based on these principals, and we worked directly with them to perfect the IRIS platform. It’s already handled more than $1 billion revenues and incorporates peermusic’s experience in markets around the world and our tech knowhow.”

“We built IRIS to allow us to best serve our clients in the digital era,” said Mary Megan Peer, Deputy CEO, peermusic. “For us this meant having a secure system with the ability to deal with significant amounts of data and with regularly changing CMO statement formats, but with quick processing time. IRIS has allowed our global royalties departments to become more efficient, allowing them more time to spend on income tracking. Our songwriters and their representatives appreciate the transparency, detailed information and ability to drill down into specific song details.”

IRIS is a royalty accounting platform for collecting, distributing, and/or reporting on music royalties. Aimed at rights owners, rights holders and rights administrators, IRIS dramatically improves on past software by maximizing automation and bringing clarity to increasingly complex processes. 

Thanks to its origins in peermusic, IRIS has been running globally for over 10 years and is already fully integrated with over 60 Collective Management Organizations (CMOs) and has over 1,000 formats for statements. IRIS is road tested and ready to boost productivity and speed everywhere.

“IRIS dramatically increases processing speed without missing any deadline or causing any distribution errors. For example, peermusic’s largest branch now can complete royalty runs in one or two hours that used to take several days,” adds Cass, “Synchtank is rolling out the system to our existing and new clients. Combined with Synchtank’s music management, sales, and licensing platform, we believe we have a game-changing solution stack for music publishers. It’s a very exciting time for us.”

“Besides providing a much-needed modern alternative in the market, IRIS has a great deal of potential in catalog evaluation,” a hot topic in this age of catalog acquisition and publishing investment, Cass explains. “As catalogs become important investment vehicles, this type of analysis and value estimation provides a key tool for potential investors, adding clarity to business decisions. Synchtank is providing the picks and shovels to prospects mining their next goldmine.”

Building on this feature set, IRIS makes sure all key elements can be customized to meet customers’ unique, specific needs. IRIS, for example, has a range of permission options to allow outside partners such as Artist managers and other teams to see just only what’s relevant for them. This transparency is coupled with high-calibre security, making for appropriate but secure access to sensitive data. “Every organization or team has its own requirements, their own IP, and their own place in the market,” notes Cass. “A cookie-cutter approach won’t capture this and won’t offer the level of efficiency we know our clients need and expect.”

ABOUT IRIS:

IRIS makes every step in the royalty administration process easy using cloud-based, scalable, energy-efficient technology. Specific features include:

• Support for migration of legacy systems
• Ability to support multiple geographic offices using different currencies, languages and both Roman and non-Roman characters
• Automatic scaling to process millions of lines of data at high speed, capture and retain all associated metadata and provide a client summary of that data in a few digestible pages
• Registration with multiple CMOs
• Ingest hundreds of different CMO statement automatically, standardizing statement processing across multiple geographies
• Calculates and distributes royalties and create tracking and income claiming reports
• Includes a branded portal for publishing clients to give meaningful access and transparency when reporting to their songwriters
• Fully cloud based with fully managed infrastructure

ABOUT SYNCHTANK:
Synchtank is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that rights owners and users of digital entertainment license to manage their assets, IP, metadata and royalties. Developed since 2010 by a team experienced in broadcast, music, film, TV, metadata, payments and technology, Synchtank’s diverse range of clients include ABKCO, British Telecom TV and Sport, CD Baby, the National Education Network, peermusic, Sony, Unilever, Universal, Vice Media, WarnerMedia and Warner Music and Warner/Chappell Production Music.  

Synchtank’s catalog management and royalty accounting platforms are modular, require minimal IT involvement and are configured to meet core business-specified needs. Accessible through UI, API, bulk data imports and exports, Synchtank has enterprise grade security in off-premise digital storage, based on AWS with highly available and scalable server clusters. The royalty accounting platform is currently live across the globe, integrated with hundreds of PROs, has over 1,000 integration points for royalty inputs and has processed many hundreds of millions of dollars.

ABOUT PEERMUSIC:
Founded by Ralph S. Peer in 1928, peermusic is the world’s largest global independent publishing company and operates 35 offices in 30 countries. With well over a quarter of a million titles in the company’s catalogue, and songs that vary from country, blues, jazz and pop to Latin, concert and rock‘n’roll, peermusic is the largest privately owned company of its kind in the world. For further information about peermusic, go to www.peermusic.com. For breaking news updates, behind-the-scenes information and photos, follow @peermusic on Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat.

Entertainment software company Synchtank has partnered with London Grid for Learning (LGfL) and a prominent production library to provide high-quality music to students and teachers in London schools. Synchtank’s software will make it easy to surface licensed tracks for school activities, from assemblies and performances, to in-classroom listening and student presentations and videos. It will also guide students toward a better understanding of intellectual property rights.

“This is an excellent way to make properly licensed music part of students’ educational experiences,” notes Chris Cass, Chief Business Officer of Synchtank. “Not only will they have hassle-free access to tracks right for a wide range of contexts, this partnership will help students see the importance of copyright and licensing.”

Educators and learners want to do the right thing--use music appropriately and do what’s best for creators--yet they often don’t have simple access to good tools and music. Synchtank wants to change that, concluding its first deal in the education space.

“LGfL is an excellent partner in this,” says Cass, “as they are focused on providing essential digital services and expert support to schools, including super-fast connectivity, support for cloud computing, and keeping children safe. Synchtank’s stable, well-designed software platform is a logical addition to their already robust offerings.”

“The ability to provide the same professional music database to our schools that is used across the world by television and film production companies is a major asset in our support for creativity across the curriculum,” Bob Usher, LGfL Content Manager explained. 

“We think the more young people understand how music licenses work, the easier it will be in the future for everyone involved to act responsibly and respect the value of an individual’s intellectual property, as students will likely continue to make content as adults,” states Cass. “We’re reaching them early on and showing them how easy it is to get licensing right if you have the correct tools. It’s a valuable lesson.”

About Synchtank
Synchtank is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that rights owners and users of digital entertainment license to manage their assets, IP, metadata and royalties. Developed since 2010 by a team experienced in broadcast, music, film, TV, metadata, payments and technology, Synchtank’s diverse range of clients include British Telecom TV and Sport, CD Baby, the National Education Network, Peer Music, Sony, Unilever, Universal, Vice Media, WarnerMedia and Warner Music Group. 

Synchtank’s catalog management and royalty accounting platforms are modular, require minimal IT involvement and are configured to meet core business-specified needs. Accessible through UI, API, bulk data imports and exports, Synchtank has enterprise grade security in off-premise digital storage, based on AWS with highly available and scalable server clusters. The royalty accounting platform is currently live across the globe, integrated with hundreds of PROs, has over 1,000 integration points for royalty inputs and runs many hundreds of millions of dollars through it per annum.

About London Grid for Learning
LGfL is a multi-award winning not for profit Charitable Trust, which aims to save schools money, keep children safe, tackle inequality, energise Teaching & Learning and enhance Wellbeing. It is a founder member of the National Education Network and providers super-fast fibre connectivity for over 3,000 schools. It is a centre of excellence for online safety, cybersecurity and provides support for special educational needs as well as large online portfolio of online learning resources.

Rights holders with large catalogs of entertainment assets face the daunting prospect of asset management, revenue maximization, and collecting fully on royalties, often measured in penny fractions. The scale is huge, the data messy, the payments complex. Rights users, on the other hand, face enormous compliance challenges when licensing content for use in production. Challenges that are further exacerbated by the ever-growing content landscape and the sheer volume of licenses required, pushing many major systems to breaking point.

Synchtank has spent the past decade creating cloud-based software to tackle the specific needs of entertainment companies, untangling the threads of metadata and money. Its customers are divided into supply-side cases (rights owners like record labels and music publishers) and demand-side cases (rights users such as studios, brands, broadcasters and networks). Whether the focus is sync pitching, royalty administration or compliance management, the platform supports the specialized workflows required in each case.

“Our customers are confronting the dilemma of build or buy,” says Synchtank CBO Chris Cass. “They may believe their problems or processes are unique, but they are often dealing with the same challenges as other companies in the entertainment space.” Synchtank finds these common bottlenecks and roadblocks, and has built a platform that eliminates them.

“As we work with clients, we help them see that the solutions they have been considering piecemeal--metadata matching, say--are already running on our platform,” explains Synchtank CEO Rory Bernard. “The flashy feature sets smaller startups offer are often just new names for old tech. We can do all that, and more. Synchtank offer comprehensive solutions with excellent reliability and security,” in an industry rife with vapourware.

Synchtank’s name speaks to its origins, though the company has morphed and grown considerably. When Joel Jordan founded the company, his main goal was maximizing his labels’ recording and publishing revenue by getting his catalog up online in an attractive format and finding efficient ways to reach music supervisors and showrunners. He decided to build his own way, and Synchtank was born.

The company has evolved rapidly in the decade that followed, expanding its solutions from sync into other key entertainment business processes. “When you work with huge catalogs, lots of issues come into play,” notes Bernard. “Most of your task as a software provider to a large entertainment company is to assure them that your service is reliable, your customer support is excellent, and that you have appropriate security protocols. These aspects are essential.”

As Synchtank turned from slick catalog presentation to a full-blown SaaS company, it attracted a notable customer base that helped define what the company developed next. “We sit down with a client and do a lot of diligence,” Cass says. “We’ll see what we can already provide, what is in the lab that we could accelerate. We see what we can build that can be used elsewhere.”

Today, Synchtank is used primarily for IP and metadata management integrated with rights clearance, royalty, and financial systems, by some of the biggest media companies in the world, including British Telecom TV and Sport, CD Baby, ClicknClear, peermusic, Sony, Unilever, Universal, Vice Media, WarnerMedia and Warner Music Group. Through its work with both rights owners and rights users, Synchtank is creating efficiencies for the entire music and entertainment ecosystem, helping all parties work together more cohesively.