Faster processing means you can pay artists sooner, reduce bottlenecks, and get back time for strategic work.
Kaitlyn Russell
Kaitlyn Russell brings a range of expertise from across the music industry. From working in licensing at CMT (Viacom) and ASCAP, to processing royalties for Big Machine Label Group, she worked as a Customer Success Manager for SR1 before landing in her current role as Manager of Royalty Services at Tone. Her experience across the industry, working in a variety of royalty systems, has given her a unique vantage point on what royalty teams really need and where their current systems are falling short. We sat down with Kaitlyn to talk about her background, what she sees as the biggest roadblocks for royalties teams, and how Tone is helping labels move past them.
Tone: How did you get into music royalties?
Kaitlyn: I started at an independent label, processing both master and mechanical royalties for their four imprints. That gave me a great foundation and helped me understand the end-to-end process, but I wanted more variety. When I moved to the royalty software side, it opened the door to working with different clients, different catalogs, different contracts —which I love. Every company has different needs.
Tone: What are the most common pain points for labels doing royalties today?
Kaitlyn: A lot of them are stuck in rigid, outdated systems. The industry is constantly changing but most royalty systems are not keeping pace. I’ve seen teams spend hours managing their royalties in Excel because their royalty system can’t accommodate their deal terms. To use a few quick examples, not all royalty systems support escalations, which means you’d need to track escalation thresholds and update sales rates manually. Some systems don’t support cross-contract relationships, which requires you to run producer/side artist statements first, post their royalties as expenses against the main artist, then run the main artist statements. Some systems can’t even support different royalty rates by configuration on a single contract. Even if you do find a system that meets all of your needs, it could take weeks or months for your team to be trained on each “module” and feel comfortable using that system.
Tone: How does Tone improve that?
Kaitlyn: Well, to start, we do support cross-contract relationships and customizable sales rates. Earlier this summer, we added escalations based on a sales or unit threshold, and SEAs (streaming equivalent albums) are in the pipeline. But more importantly, Tone aims to replace your spreadsheets. The system functions like a spreadsheet itself; you can easily copy/paste or drag down to populate the cells. There are no separate “modules” to learn. Our in-app navigation is intuitive, whether you’ve worked in every other system or never processed royalties before. Our goal is to have Tone be your source of truth and one-stop shop for royalties processing. If there’s a part of the process that you’re still spending a lot of time managing outside the system, we want to know.
Tone: You mentioned working with other software. How is Tone different?
Kaitlyn: A huge difference is how we respond to feedback. With other royalty systems, your feature requests might be added to an untouched queue or sent into a black hole. Here, if a single client brings something up, we talk about it as a team: Why do they need it? How are they managing this process now? What value might this bring to our other clients? It’s always approached with curiosity, which is something I really appreciate about our team.
One of my favorite things about working at Tone is getting to help shape product development. With any new update or feature request, I’m there to trace the impact. If we make this change, how would this affect sales, contracts, catalog, statement output, etc? In addition to providing input on client suggestions, I’m regularly submitting my own feature requests. I’m a Tone user; I’m working in the app every single day. Having worked in Curve, Record Maestro, SR1, Infinite Catalog, etc., I get to take that knowledge, the limitations and frustrations I’ve experienced in other systems, and use that experience to help build my dream royalty system. Our engineers listen to that feedback—and often push to make it even better.
Tone: Has that led to any surprising improvements?
Kaitlyn: Yes! A great example is project-level budgeting. One client asked if there was an easy way for them to view total income, total costs, and total royalties paid to date for any given project. When we asked how they were currently tracking this, they shared an incredibly detailed Google Sheet, with dozens of tabs, which they need to spend a lot of time maintaining. After we began discussing internally, we suddenly started hearing this request from more and more clients. It’s not something I’ve seen in another royalty system. Sure, there are workarounds; you could create dummy contracts for each project to track sales and costs, or you could try to cobble together multiple different custom reports. But we believe it should be simpler than that. You shouldn’t need to be an expert user to get the data you need out of your system. Now we’re working to design something that brings that project-level budget tracking into Tone in an accessible and easily understandable way.
Tone: What makes Tone easier to migrate to than other platforms?
Kaitlyn: Honestly, it’s just less rigid. Most systems require super-specific import templates. You populate the spreadsheet in Excel, upload it, hope it works. With Tone, there are no templates. Since the system functions more like a spreadsheet, you can copy/paste directly into the app. And my team has completed data migrations from every other major system—so we know what to expect.
Tone: You recently processed 1,700+ statements with 4M sales lines in just 28 minutes. Tell us more about that.
Kaitlyn: In my career, I’ve had the opportunity to process royalties for the same label in 3 different systems. That calculation used to take 8+ hours in SR1, 2.5 hours in Curve. In Tone? 28 minutes. I was shocked. And we’ve performed parallel runs with other systems— Tone is just significantly faster. The same is true for sales file processing; what used to take me hours can now take minutes. And when I say that to our engineers, they usually say, “We can probably make it even faster.”
Tone: And what kind of impact does that speed have?
Kaitlyn: It’s massive. It means you can make same-day revisions. When I worked at a label, the artist royalty calculation would take an entire workday, so we would run statements, spend 2-3 days reviewing and making any necessary adjustments, lose another workday re-running the calculation, then rinse and repeat. Faster processing means you can get statements published earlier, pay your artists sooner, and that invaluable time you’ve saved can be spent on other projects.
Tone: What about payments and artist communication?
Kaitlyn: Other systems may require you to format statement emails manually, and send them out one by one. In a previous role, it used to take a team of 2-4 people several days to prepare statement email drafts; it would take another full day just to send those emails out..
Tone handles that with one click. Click to publish statements and they’ll be immediately emailed to payees. Click to fund the period and we’ll handle paying out the statement balances. And our clients don’t need to worry about keeping track of payee banking or tax information. Tone collects that data from your payees when they register with Tone, and it’s easy to export when 1099 season comes around.
Tone: How do artists benefit from this?
Kaitlyn: Our Insights dashboard is really intuitive. Instead of digging through a PDF, or even their detailed Sales, Costs, and Transactions csv statements, artists can easily filter in Tone to view their earnings by track, source, territory, configuration, and more. And Tone does not limit how many users can be linked to a specific payee. Artists can give their entire team access to their Tone statements and Insights (with customizable user permissions). Managers don’t need to call the label to ask for basic info—they just log in and see it. It empowers everyone.
Tone handles that with one click. Click to publish statements and they’ll be immediately emailed to payees. Click to fund the period and we’ll handle paying out the statement balances. And our clients don’t need to worry about keeping track of payee banking or tax information. Tone collects that data from your payees when they register with Tone, and it’s easy to export when 1099 season comes around.
Tone: What upcoming features are you most excited about?
Kaitlyn: Sales file processing, for sure. Most systems rely on import templates that break when DSPs update their reporting format, requiring you to create a new template, edit the existing template (which is risky), or maybe you’re spending hours formatting sales files in Excel instead to avoid this. Also, other systems don’t lock their sales templates once they’ve been used in a royalty run. If you processed File A with Template A, report those sales lines on royalty statements, and then someone makes changes to Template A while trying to process File B? You’ve now lost your record of exactly how File A was processed. In Tone, our “templates” are saved at the file level. You can easily copy column mappings/rules from another file, but your past processing steps for each individual sales file are always preserved. It’s accurate, traceable, and way less risky.
Want to see how Tone can support your team? Book a demo and walk through your setup with us.