Mapping Contracts to Tracks & Releases

The Rights tab on your Track or Release page is where catalogue items are connected to one or more contracts to account for Sales/Returns & Costs. The Participation Rate specifies in which share of the revenue or costs a Contract will participate. Adding a Contract with a participation rate of 100 would mean 100% of the sales revenue (or costs) of this track will be allocated to this particular Contract. It is then down to the royalty rates on this Contract to calculate how much of this sales revenue will eventually be paid as a royalty to the artist.

One trick Curve has up its sleeves that may save you a heap of time is the Pro Rata From Tracks feature. This feature leads Curve to pro rate all the revenue of a Release across all the Tracks on that Release. Essentially removing the requirement of you to manually map Contracts to your Releases.

A Couple of Examples

In the below example, all revenue will be allocated as an input to the Artist A contract.

In the below example, revenue would be split evenly & allocated as an input to the Artist A & Artist B contracts. Imagine this track has a total net amount of $1000; $500 will be allocated to Artist A & the other $500 will be allocated to Artist B. It is then down to the terms of these contracts to calculate how much will eventually end up on these artists their Closing Balance.

In our final example, Artist A is added to the Track with a participation rate of 100, also Artist B is added with a participation rate of 100 & Artist C is added with a participation rate of 20. Imagine this same total net amount of $1000; the full $1000 will be allocated to Artist A’s contract, but also $1000 will be allocated to Artist B’s contract & $200 will be allocated to Artist C. Effectively your total input is higher than your actual earnings, & it will be down to the royalty rates on the contract to calculate the royalty share for each artist. Make sure this is what you’re looking to achieve when adding participation rates that total to more than 100. In practice, the setup in this example reflects a Track with two primary artists & one featured artist or producer, whose royalties can then be subtracted from the primary artists via Cross-Contracts.

It is important to think about your Participation Rates in relation to the Royalty % or Profit Share % in your Contract's terms. In the example of a Track with $1000 worth of revenue, where 25% of the revenue should be paid to Artist A, and 25% of the revenue should be paid to Artist B, you have two options. Either you assign both Contracts to the Track with a Participation Rate of 100% each, and set the Royalty % in each Contract to 25%. Or you assign both Contracts to the Track with a Participation Rate of 50%, and set the Royalty % in each Contract to 50%. Both options are correct, because $1000 x 100% x 25% = $1000 x 50% x 50% = $250. Whether your Participation Rates are right or wrong thus largely depends on whether your Contract's Royalty % already consider the share of revenue in which the Contract participates.