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Business News Labels & Publishers
Universal Music Publishing unveils new royalty reporting portal
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 19 February 2020
Universal Music Publishing yesterday unveiled a revamp to its royalty reporting systems with a platform called UMPG Window. It is, says the major, “a next-generation royalty portal that provides songwriters and clients with instant access to clear, complete and real-time earnings and data”. It can be installed on iOS and Android devices.
Fans of detail – and the songwriters and managers who care about things like this are usually big fans of detail – might want to know that UMPG Window uses, apparently, “the latest in cloud-indexing technology” meaning that it is “unparalleled in offering information on a highly-granular level”.
The official blurb goes on: “Available in both numeric and graphic representations, clients will instantaneously view earnings by work title, accounting periods, territory, digital service provider, income source, income group, income type, local/international and more”. Fun times.
Says John Reston, UMPG’s EVP of Global Administration: “In designing and developing UMPG Window, our team worked closely with our songwriters and clients to best understand what they most wanted from a world-class, fully transparent portal and app. This kind of collaboration is a reflection of how we do business: our songwriters and publisher clients are partners in everything we do”.
With the shift to streaming – which has resulted in much more usage data, and much more accurate usage data – the music publishing sector at large has been under pressure to get better at reporting usage and royalties to writers.
Kobalt was among the first to raise everyone’s expectations in this domain, and others then followed. In terms of the majors, it felt like Universal was the first to respond to the “Kobalt effect” by evolving and enhancing its reporting platform. But more recently Sony/ATV has ramped up its reporting systems too. With the new fangled UMPG Window, Universal reckons it is now offering some reporting services not available anywhere else.
The company’s EVP Global Technology, Mark Coltman, adds “UMPG Window is a testament to our commitment to building and delivering the best, most scalable systems in music publishing. Our guiding principle was creating a resource that empowered our songwriters and clients to easily access meaningful, usable and accurate data. We are so proud that the resulting application – functionally rich with superb, instant analytics – will be an outstanding, valuable tool that exceeds all expectations”.
