15 workflows that are just better in Tone.
Here at Tone, we have a team of royalties professionals with 30+ years of combined experience. Our team knows how to process royalty periods accurately, expertly avoiding the pitfalls in other royalty processing platforms.
But we’re guessing you didn’t get into the music industry because you’re passionate about the math on artists’ statements, like our team is. You want to pay your artists fairly, accurately, and on time, but the prospect of learning how to do it yourself or hiring a team is overwhelming. We saw this as an opportunity to meet you where you are and build a more intuitive and comprehensive platform with validations built in to protect you from tripping yourself up.
To be fair, comparing other royalty platforms and Tone isn’t a 1:1 comparison. Other royalty platforms are royalty accounting softwares that have established themselves as reliable tools for royalties experts to complete the accounting task. On the other hand, Tone is an integrated platform for royalty accounting, data analytics, and payments. Tone is designed to be user-friendly and transparent for everyone, providing additional features and empowering your whole team to maximize the royalties workflow.
Here are 15 reasons modern music companies should choose Tone over other royalty platforms:
1. Tone includes integrated payments. Once you’ve processed your royalties and generated statements, the next step is getting money into the hands of your payees. Easier said than done. With other royalty platforms, your team has to manage a separate payments tool, which introduces additional steps and opportunities for mistakes. With Tone, payments are fully integrated into your workflow and processed through the Tone app. We also provide fund tracking, and our support team manages any returned payments, freeing up even more time for your team. Most importantly, your team is in control of which statements get paid out, whether that’s all of them or just a subset, and when.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
2. Tone gathers your payee bank account and tax information. We knew that integrated payments would be a valuable function for a royalties platform, but we didn’t stop there. Tone only pays payee accounts that have verifiable tax info on file, and we collect that info from your payees as part of our payee onboarding process. So, say goodbye to chasing down tax info come tax time! Our team also collects your payees’ bank account information, so that it’s easy to make payments when you’re ready. This is just another way our software-and-services offering helps your team focus on more high-value activities than confirming routing numbers.
3. Tone handles your payee support. When you and your payees begin using Tone, our support team makes themselves available to answer any questions your payees have related to royalties, payments, and using Tone. That can be dozens of emails landing in our inbox instead of yours, and our friendly support team provides quick responses, making your payee experience even better. With this service, the conversations you have with your payees can be focused on the music you’re making together, rather than what each line of their royalty statement means or when to expect their next payment.
4. Tone offers your payees a uniquely valuable experience. With Tone, you can offer current and future artists easy-to-read statements, expert support from the Tone team, a personalized dashboard, predictable royalty accounting, and analytics tools that help them understand their income better. With other royalty platforms, you’ll get your artist statements and … that’s about it. Your payees are the heart of your business and giving them tools that help them succeed will be a competitive advantage when you’re looking to sign your new favorite artist.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
5. Tone is for your whole team: leaders, A&R, accountants, marketers, and everyone else. Companies that use other royalty platforms probably aren’t sharing it with their label managers or marketing teams. On other royalty platforms, there’s not much designed for those groups, and it’s not easy enough to access what is there. The opposite is true of Tone. We’ve specifically designed features that your execs and A&R team members will be eager to access, like our insights dashboards. Plus, we’ve made it super easy to add team members and set their permissions, so your whole team can have access to only the tools and information they’ll find valuable. Maybe your marketing team wants to add marketing costs and view insights on per-project spend in the insights tab. Maybe your accountants want to fund royalty periods and view past payments. You can even add your outside legal counsel to add in contract information and details as they’re negotiated. No matter what your team looks like, all access is controlled by you, but we recommend you don’t hog Tone!
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
6. Tone provides a guided onboarding experience. Changing software tools can be daunting. In the royalties world, it’s often an incredibly painful process that involves numerous templates your team has to fill out in detail before uploading the templates to your new system and reconciling any errors that appear. At Tone, we appreciate the challenge that changing platforms presents and the trust you put in us as you make the move. For that reason, we’ve developed a process that guides you through onboarding, with dedicated working sessions and expert consultation from our support and royalty services teams. Plus, all of your onboarding data is entered in our app (no excel templates here!) and validated as you go.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
7. Tone lets you visualize the relationships between your royalty data. You know there are contracts, payees, catalog, territories, and rate models affecting your royalty calculations. But where do you go to see which artist contract is linked to which tracks on which releases? And is it set up right? At Tone, we’ve answered these questions with convenient, integrated ways to see all those interconnections, including crossed contracts, and verify they’re set up accurately. For example, in Tone you can quickly jump between a contract and its payee, because the contract view has a link to the payee, and the payee view has a link to the contract. In the interfaces of other royalty platforms, each payee is listed in the contract view, but it’s not a link, so you have to search that payee name separately on the payee page, which makes moving between items time consuming.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
8. Tone can collect sales statements on your behalf. If you want to save extra time, Tone provides the option for you to skip a couple of steps by giving us access to your sales sources. To take advantage, just share the login credentials for your sales portals, and we will sync over new statements when they become available. Once the sales statements are processed, your team will receive a notification to complete the sales reconciliation workflow before we include the statement in a royalty period.
9. Tone gives you an opportunity to verify that you received the funds indicated in your sales statements. Have you ever wondered whether the totals on your sales statements match the funds deposited in your bank account? Tone has. That’s why we built our sales reconciliation workflow, which encourages you to verify the income you received before we include your statement in a royalty run. Other royalty platforms lack this verification step, which means it’s on you to verify that information outside of your royalties workflow.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
10. Tone provides near real-time insights into your income data. Once upon a time, the music industry waited six months to see the contents of their sales statements in a digestible way. At Tone, we know that data is too valuable to wait until your next semi-annual royalty period. Now, when you upload a sales statement in Tone, we start processing the statement immediately, then give you access to a page of insights that show which artists, tracks, and territories drove that income.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
11. Tone streamlines managing costs & expenses in-app. The money you spend on behalf of your payees is a key piece of royalties data, and Tone saves you time (and headaches) with our in-app Costs tool. In Tone, you can quickly copy & paste thousands of costs directly into the app, immediately validate each line, and easily connect your costs to a track, release, or contract, using Tone’s intuitive mapping functionality. Any costs you mark “Ready” are automatically included in the next applicable royalty period, based on your mapping. Compare that to the processes of other royalty platforms, where you have to download a spreadsheet, enter your costs, upload the completed spreadsheet, and wait to see if the other royalty platforms report any errors when parsing the file. Then, if you have multiple upcoming periods, you’ll need to remember to manually select the correct upcoming period for each cost based on the contract mapped to that cost. Time is money, and you’re losing it doing costs the way other royalty platforms do.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
12. Tone prevents errors with in-app validations. We know how much data goes into processing royalties and the level of attention to detail that’s required to do it correctly. That’s why we’ve built guardrails into our platform, to help you identify the tiny mistakes that can have an outsized impact on your calculations. For example, Tone flags potential duplicate catalog, sales, or costs as you go and warns you when you’ve entered a cost, advance, or opening balance with an unusual sign (negative vs positive number), allowing you to resolve those issues quickly. Tone also checks that all transactions within a statement sum to equal the closing balance and that closing balances match the opening balances of subsequent periods. It’s much harder to catch these types of mistakes on other royalty platforms, since the platform is built for experts who know to look for those specific errors and lacks the built-in checks and validations that we believe are essential.
13. Tone gives a clear view of how much payees have recouped in an easy-to-read visualization. Understanding your payees’ advances and how much they’ve recouped is a critical piece of information for your team. With that in mind, we asked ourselves what the easiest way to see that information would be and developed a dashboard that shows each of your payees and the percentage of their advance that’s been recouped. On other royalty platforms, you can get your payees’ negative balances easily, but the rest of that math is on you.
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
14. Tone provides data analytics and an insights dashboard. Your royalties data are a gold mine of business insights, and making sure your whole team has easy access to that gold mine is one of our favorite things. Tone’s user-friendly insights dashboards quickly perform aggregations across millions of sales that exceed the Excel row limit (~1 million rows). Our unparalleled analytics tooling also gives you a variety of filters that allow you to dig into the integrated view of your sales data once it’s been processed in a royalty period. Plus, you’re able to save key views of the data for frequent reporting, and they update automatically when new data arrives!
*Disclaimer: The data shown here is for demonstration purposes only.
15. Tone is a pleasure to use. Although some other royalty platforms were certainly an upgrade from older systems, Tone is truly a platform for the future of the music industry. Tone is designed to be user-friendly and easy to navigate with really fast load times, so you’re never stuck wondering. While other royalty platforms and other royalty accounting platforms are made up of pages of uniform form fields and lists, Tone’s accessible interface integrates data visualization and tool-tips, highlights important tasks, and communicates what to expect next. Each aspect of our app is thoughtfully developed with your team in mind, so that processing royalties can be something you want to do.