Introduction to Curve
Welcome to Curve! This Getting Started guide is designed to equip you with the basic skills to start reporting your royalties, & to help you understand how to manage the key processes involved in royalty reporting. This guide should take no more than one hour to fully walkthrough. By the end of this tutorial, you will leave with a solid understanding of how to onboard your business onto Curve & create your artist statements.
What Is Curve?
Curve is a new breed of royalty system, designed for the scale & requirements of today’s music industry. It utilises the best in cloud technology, with a simple & elegant user interface, that allows you to manage your data & contracts in order to report on to your artists, composers & rights holders, in transparent, comprehensive & easy to understand statements.
You can give your entire team access to Curve, so they can manage their piece of the process. But you can also open up access to your artists, composers & rights holders to their personal portal where they can access their statements & data. Curve is putting the infrastructure of the majors into the hands of everyone.
Who Is Curve For?
Curve is for record labels, publishers, distributors & anyone else who needs to report royalties. The flexibility in the platform allows you to set up the system to fit your business, whatever rights you may hold.
Finding Your Way Around
To get you started on your Curve journey, let’s first explain how Curve organises data, & what each area within the system does. Altogether, Curve has 10 areas that can be accessed via our left-hand sided toolbar.
Tools highlighted with a ✪ are available on a Curve Pro plan.
- Dashboard – Your Curve homepage.
- Companies (✪)– Here you can detail on whose behalf you will be sending statements, and customise your statement design.
- Contracts – Contracts and Payees are how you organise your partners that you must report to. Whether this is the Artists, Composers, Sub-Publishers or Label Partners – you can organise their contracts, along with their specific terms & payment information here.
- Catalogue – This is where you store your catalogue data, whether that’s Releases and Tracks for a record label, or Works, Composers and Publishers for a music publisher. Here you can organise your catalogue, & manage the metadata that will ultimately populate your statements and reports.
- Sales – Here you will manage the uploading and ingestion of your master sales or publishing income, telling Curve how to read your files using Templates, and uploading and assigning your expenses and costs.
- Statements – This is where you manage the production of your Statements and bundle sales together into a Period.
- Data – Our Analytics visualise your revenue and helps you understand your data. You can define what you wish to visualise, and how. If you wish to dig deeper, with Reports, you can create custom reports to export your Sales and Cost information from the system. Think of this as your big pivot table in the sky, and how you can access your data.
- Settings – The Settings area is used to configure the system to your needs; allowing you to set currencies, create Channels, Configurations and Cost Types, along with customising your default statement design.
- Users – Here you can give your team access to Curve, but also give your artists, composers and rights-holders access to their personal portal.
Each of these areas will eventually interact with one another. You create Templates to be able to upload your Sales statements; the revenue of these Sales will be linked to tracks, releases or works in your Catalogue; this Catalogue is linked to your Contracts who will calculate the royalty due; which is associated with a Payee so you know who to pay these royalties to. Once it’s time to account to your artists, you will bundle these sales and royalties into one royalty Period that will create the Statements for your artists and show them what they have earned.
Now you know what Curve is, and the main elements, let’s look at the onboarding process.