2nd Foundation Music

2nd Foundation Music (2FM) is a library music publisher, providing high quality live instrumental recordings for film, television and other media. 2FM publishes music to many countries throughout the world via a number of intermediary distributors.

2FM receives royalty and usage data in a number of non-standard formats from their worldwide distributors. This data has to be parsed and referenced against royalty share information for each track, which is stored by a third party music metadata aggregator. Royalties received must then be paid to all interested parties, including composers, publishers and production companies.

This presented a complex and time-consuming administration task each time it was necessary to distribute royalties to all interested parties. Originally, the royalty statements were manually parsed, copied to a spreadsheet, and amounts owed were calculated using spreadsheet formulae. This was a slow, error-prone process, and as the library and number of interested parties grew, it became infeasible to achieve without automation.

Klever worked with 2nd Foundation Music to specify and build a bespoke system which automates their music library management, worldwide usage reporting and royalty payment calculation. This saves hundreds of administration hours, removes the room for human error, and provides a clear audit trail for all calculations and payments.

There is no comparable product on the market that could achieve the same customisation. At a high level, the system consists of:

• an extract, transform, load (ETL) layer to ingest payout statements in any format, extract standard data and allow for editing/verification if required, before saving to a central data store;
• an integration with a third-party music management system to enable the import of album and track data; a central logic system to contain the complex business logic involved in calculating payouts, taking into account each contributor’s entitlement to the royalty earned by each track, depending on standard or individual contracts;
• a messaging system to automatically notify contributors of upcoming payments and provide copies of generated statements;
• a payment tracking system to record currency transfer.

Because the system deals with monetary payments, there is no room for error. The code base is fully unit tested, with a complete continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflow for high-availability.