The Story of IC

or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love Royalties

Hey there,

Hunter here, co-founder of Infinite Catalog and royalty nerd in chief.

People often ask how we got started, or why we built IC in the first place. Happily there’s a straightforward answer: we built IC to turn royalties from a weakness into a strength, for ourselves and for you.

A long time ago, I started a record label called Infinite Best. I just wanted to help artists put out records and get heard, but soon found myself in “spreadsheet hell,” trying to figure out how much money was being earned and spent, and most importantly, what everybody was owed and what I was actually making.

Turned out this was called “royalty accounting,” and it was a big part of my job. But I didn’t really know what I was doing, it took forever, and every six months I’d have to do it all over again. I lived in fear that I was doing it wrong, that my artists would think I was being shady with their money or was bad at my job, but had no one to turn to about it.

Every label I spoke to seemed to feel the same way, and because of streaming and the explosion of new ways to earn income from music, it was getting harder and harder to keep track of everything and get royalties done, let alone analyze the data or share it transparently with our artists.

I looked for software that could help, some kind of “quickbooks for royalties,” but everything I found seemed really out of date, too complicated, too expensive; I looked for royalty services to do it for me, but they didn’t seem to exist. So I stuck with spreadsheets, and began offering freelance royalty accounting services myself.

The labels that signed up were thrilled to have help with royalties, and more kept showing up through word of mouth. Eventually I asked Udbhav Gupta from the band Mr Twin Sister, no stranger to royalties and a talented programmer, if he might be interested in building the kind of software I thought should have existed in the first place.

We built a prototype and called it Infinite Catalog, realizing that it could work for record labels, publishers, managers, or any other kind of “catalog” business – and especially artists, who are all these things at once.

We built it to handle any kind or source of income so catalogs could grow organically, and focused on making it easy to onboard, keep royalties up to date, and add new catalog, so they could grow faster without increasing the admin burden.

And, in no small part because Udbhav is an artist/payee himself, we made sure catalogs could provide payees with access not just to statements, but also dashboards, data, and the tools to analyze it all themselves, so everyone could finally be on the same page and grow better together.

With IC, royalty accounting – once a source of fear, tension, and FOMO about missed opportunities – can now be a strength, a value-add that catalogs are bringing to the table. As one of our early adopters put it, IC “provides a whole new level of transparency that we’re proud of, a significant talking point with potential signees.”

Hundreds of catalogs now use IC to account to tens of thousands of payees, with more joining every day. We’re so grateful to do this work, and our excitement and energy to improve the software (and service!) is only getting stronger.

Thanks for reading, and no matter what shape, size, or kind of catalog you are, we hope you’ll give IC a try. You can always contact me directly if you have any questions at hunter@infinitecatalog.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

– Hunter