Infinite Catalog – Royalty accounting doesn't have to be hard.

Distributor splits tools: so close, yet so far

There are a lot of distributors out there – help us map them! – and some of them have the ability for users to divvy up royalties amongst collaborators. Around the IC office (discord), we call these “splits tools.” These tools can be super helpful! You can release a track or a whole record or… Continue reading Distributor splits tools: so close, yet so far

The 360 deal wasn’t wrong, it was oriented incorrectly

If you’re a creator, or work with creators, you might be familiar with something called the “360 deal.” These largely-maligned deals became a thing in the mid aughts, right as record royalties started taking a nosedive and everybody was scrambling to keep the money train rolling. They were supposedly pioneered by Paramore’s manager Jeff Hansen,… Continue reading The 360 deal wasn’t wrong, it was oriented incorrectly

True Royalty Stories: Rwanda’s Rev Share

Learned about a fascinating revenue share instance via ye olde 60 Minutes. Rwanda’s had a boom of eco-tourism lately, with an increasing number of people willing to pay $1500/person to hang out with the mountain gorillas native to their region. Hotels and services have popped up to round out the experience, with the total sector… Continue reading True Royalty Stories: Rwanda’s Rev Share

longevity, transparency and mobility

Cherie Hu’s recent Extended Play article “An overabundance of music NFT platforms — and scams” is well worth a read, diving deep on how some new startups in the space are engaging in increasingly shady behavior to try and stand out from the pack (or justify their VC cash). It ends with this sage bit… Continue reading longevity, transparency and mobility

True Royalty Stories

Real life tales of (in)famous royalty accounting Story #1: Kevin Smith vs. Miramax This started with me trying to run down a rumor I’d heard that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck weren’t paid any backend royalties for Good Will Hunting. Instead I found this juicy story from Kevin Smith’s recent press tour for a new documentary about… Continue reading True Royalty Stories

The Original Inspiration

I don’t remember how I found it or who sent it to me (probably Ben Goldberg at BaDaBing! Records), but I know it blew my mind apart immediately, and I kept thinking about it for days, weeks, months after. I highly doubt IC would exist without it. From the ~colorful~ opening to the spine-shivering final… Continue reading The Original Inspiration

The story of Infinite Catalog

It all started in 2009… I’d released a few things on my DIY label Infinite Best, and gotten hired by the great BaDaBing! Records in Brooklyn. One of my many jobs there was to do the royalty accounting using spreadsheets. (This is Hunter btw – I’m the co-founder of Infinite Catalog, along with Udbhav Gupta.… Continue reading The story of Infinite Catalog

We Are Living in a Materialized World

Here at IC, the main technical challenge we face is adding up lots of numbers in a dynamic and performant way. The advent of streaming means that modern royalty accounting involves millions of individual transactions, and even the most optimized database queries start suffering from performance issues. We’ve spent the last couple of months building architecture to handle this issue, and I’m excited to share what we’ve come up with. It relies on two main pieces: materialized views in our PostgreSQL database, and leveraging a change data capture event stream in Kafka to trigger refreshing those materialized views.