A backbeat by musical definition is a strong accent on one of the normally unaccented beats of the bar and so it is for the eponymously named tech platform whose emphasis is very much on the offbeat world of royalties. Often confusing and rarely fully understood, it is the income stream of royalties flowing through the veins of production music that often provides its very lifeblood and navigating the journey from rights registration to royalty distribution is the speciality of the Backbeat software.
As a new partner of the Production Music Awards in 2022, we thought it would be a good time to get to know a little bit more about Backbeat, and its CEO Chris Chambers…
“As a commercial package Backbeat has been in existence for 10 years but as a consultancy service supporting and creating in-house systems at major labels and music publishers we have over 30 years’ experience so our software is built upon very firm foundations, centred upon direct experience from within the music industry itself.
The software was launched in 2012 with a mission to provide the music business with a system that could cover all areas of royalty accounting and today we have clients spread across the globe in Europe, USA, Australia, S.Africa, S.America and S.E. Asia.
The common problem confronting all music companies that manage intellectual property is the sheer volume of sales data that they have to manage. The challenge is matching all this income back to the correct metadata and then accounting to an increasing number of participants on every recording. Not only does our software do all this slicing and dicing automatically but it also distributes the end royalty result to all of those payees.
Over the last six years we have seen a huge upsurge in the number of Production Music Companies and Libraries who have adopted our software, attracted by our sensible pricing and the automated registration capabilities of the platform.
PRO registration can be a daunting task when performed manually but by deploying our cloud-based software users are able to output all of that data automatically in what is known as a CWR (Common Works Registration) file and register a complete library in one hit.
Ingesting metadata to the platform is also effortless and we have a seamless transfer of data from Harvest, Source Audio & Cadenza Box.
We have also developed a number of advanced royalty functions, specifically for Production Music, to distribute and pro-rate blanket fees, re-coup costs and expenses by album, deduct producer royalties and generate finder-fee kick-backs.
We estimate that once a Backbeat royalty system is set up and configured to the particular requirements of each customer the whole royalty accounting cycle takes only hours where once as a manual operation it may have taken days.
We operate the Software-as-a-Service model with an emphasis very much on personal service. We enjoy building relationships with all of our customers and you’ll never find us hiding behind faceless technology as is so common in software support these days.
We like to think that although Backbeat is concerned with back-office functions, when it comes to rights and royalties, our expertise and knowledge places us very much in the foreground of support for Production Music.”
Chris Chambers – CEO Backbeat Solutions
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