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Salt acquires Session, announces BumaStemra deal

By | Published on Monday 13 March 2023

Session

Music rights and royalties management platform Salt last week announced it had acquired creator collaboration and data management tool Session. As part of the deal, Session co-founder Björn Ulvaeus of Abba fame has been appointed to Salt’s board of directors.

“Salt and Session are two indispensable links in the chain that will achieve fair compensation and transparency for creators and rightsholders”, says Ulvaeus. “I am delighted to join the board of Salt and to work with this prestigious team to bring the transparency and accuracy to the industry that we have all waited so long to achieve”.

Session – which began life as Auddly – is an app that partly helps collaborating artists and songwriters manage their collaborations, but also makes it easier for those music-makers to agree copyright ownership splits, and then collate and submit all the relevant rights data that is required to ensure they get credited and paid when their music is played.

As for Salt, its main service is – according to the official blurb – “a back-office software-as-a-service product for the music industry” which “leverages deep domain knowledge and unrivalled cloud-computing technology expertise to deliver next-generation, global music royalty collection services for rightsholders”.

The company was co-founded by Phil Sant and Doug Imrie, who have both worked with Session for some time, it having had an alliance with another company they co-founded, Stage Enterprises. Alongside the announcement of the Session acquisition, Salt also confirmed it had signed a ten year agreement with Dutch collecting society BumaStemra to provide its royalty collection technology.

“BumaStemra’s ambition is to be at the forefront of modern music royalty collections and to provide our members with the best possible service”, says the society’s CEO Bernard Kobes. “The long-term partnership with Salt enables us to achieve that goal and positions our members at the forefront of industry innovation and monetisation”.

“Salt’s advanced capabilities, designed in collaboration with BumaStemra’s experts, allows us to automate and streamline our processes, maximise monetisation, and provide much greater transparency”, he goes on. “Our members continuously seek faster, more accurate, more regular and transparent income. Salt enables us to provide exactly that”.

Commenting on both the Buma and Session deals from the Salt side, Imrie comments: “We are THRILLED to announce these major deals with BumaStemra and Session. These partnerships will enable Salt to press ahead with innovation and provide our users, and their members, with the most comprehensive and efficient music rights management solution in the market. We look forward to continuing to lead the way in the music industry’s long-awaited and inevitable transformation”.



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