Downtown Music launched Curve Royalty Services on Thursday for labels, publishers and distributors hoping to find a third party to handle the arduous task of accounting for them. Downtown previously acquired Curve Royalty Systems in 2023.
“It's always been our goal to make rights better and easier,” Richard Leach, CEO of Curve, said in a statement. “Now our rights services team can take over those parts of the process [that] clients would like to outsource”.
Curve launched in 2019. “We get data from Spotify, Apple Music, any physical distributors, 1,000+ different sources,” co-founder Tom Allen explained in 2022. “Then we allow labels and publishers to enter the contract details and we pull out the artist statements.”
“In its simplest form,” he added, “it's a bit of math.”
But it can be a lot of math in the age of streaming. Back in 2012, when streaming services started getting more users, “statements we were used to seeing, maybe we'd hit hundreds of thousands of lines in a statement and you could still manage it in Excel,” Leach added in the same interview. . “Suddenly we were getting millions and millions of lines of data every month. Anyone familiar with Excel knows that it crashes on a million rows.”
In this new landscape, some labels and distributors were “really struggling,” Leach continued. “And that was really the genesis of Curve. We struggled to find the software to handle the scale. Suddenly procedures took days instead of hours. We couldn't find a solution” — until “Tom thought he'd have a crack in his build.”
Curve expanded to the US in 2021. The following year, the company said it processed nearly $1 billion in revenue. It currently serves around 1,500 clients, including notable independent labels such as Domino, Epitaph and Armada.
Downtown acquired Curve in January 2023. “We are fans of the technology and quality of service that Tom and Richard have created,” Downtown CEO Andrew Bergman he said then.
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