RYLTY

RYLTY provides software for music rights owners and investors to store, analyze and correct ownership and royalty statement data. Its customer base is described as ranging from small family offices to multi-billion dollar funds. The product line is modular: the RYLTY Portal ingests royalty statements and catalog exports via drag-and-drop into an ingestion engine and returns organized ownership and consumption data that can be tracked, enriched, analyzed, filtered and exported; RYLTY Error Analysis identifies and values registration errors at a rights owner's label, publishing and PRO/CMO partners that cause incorrect royalty payments; and RYLTY Error Administration has RYLTY's own royalty professionals issue corrections and resolve errors on the client's behalf on an error-by-error basis.

The company positions the platform as a tool that empowers existing royalty administrators rather than replacing them, and states that features are only shipped when they lead to action or purposeful inaction. RYLTY presents itself as a product built specifically for music rights investors, as an alternative to general-purpose spreadsheets and analytics tools or combinations of tools designed for other music industry use cases. The company is affiliated with Leftbrain, a tech-enabled music business management firm founded by co-founder Nicholas Judd, and its site identifies RYLTY as "a Leftbrain Company."

Founding story

The concept behind RYLTY was conceived in 2020 by Nicholas Judd and Andrew Calloway as a tool to help Calloway recover lost royalties and maximize catalog values for his consulting clients. Within less than a year the tool was used to recover more than $1 million in lost royalties and $10 million in added catalog value. In 2022 Judd and Calloway decided to build a venture-scale startup to correct royalty data more broadly, and Judd recruited Juan Carlos (JC) Mauras, a long-time friend, as the third, technical co-founder. The company states it was founded in 2023 and is backed by Techstars Music.

Business model

RYLTY sells modular software to music rights owners and investors, combining a data platform (RYLTY Portal) with opt-in analytical and service layers (Error Analysis and Error Administration). For its royalty recovery service the company describes a contingency model: it collects 30% of music royalties recovered for prior periods and 0% of royalties unlocked for future periods, with no payment if nothing is recovered and no commission on royalties not resulting from enrollment. Where a royalty balance is unrecouped, the fee is not due until the client recoups or receives a further advance, and is waived if neither occurs.

Contingency-based fees of 30% on recovered prior-period royalties, none on future-period royalty increases; the company states this equates to under 5% of total royalties generated. Software is offered as a portal with opt-in add-on modules.

Traction

The company states that rights owners have collectively increased catalog valuations by more than $20 million by correcting identified errors, that it has identified over 3,000 errors resulting in larger royalty payments, and that 100% of its customers have received increased royalty payments and higher catalog valuations after correcting identified errors. It also cites that 45% of songs contain registration errors causing incorrect royalty payments. A customer testimonial comes from Matt Schneider of Artist Financial Services | Open Season.

Latest developments

The website markets the Portal, Error Analysis and Error Administration modules and identifies the company as backed by Techstars Music and as a Leftbrain company.