Introducing Resolut: Digital Rights Management Reimagined

It started with a spreadsheet. A really, really bad spreadsheet.

Not one spreadsheet, actually — dozens of them. Ownership records on one, writer splits on another, sync licenses buried in an email thread from 2019 that nobody could find. PRO registration numbers in a Notes file on someone's phone. A co-producer whose share of a track was "verbal," which is another way of saying "gone."

We've all been there. If you've managed music rights for more than six months, you know this feeling: the creeping dread that somewhere in your catalog, money is leaking, a dispute is forming, or a sync opportunity is about to fall through because you can't get your clearance documentation together fast enough.

That frustration is why we built Resolut.

The Problem We Kept Running Into

The music industry moved to streaming. It moved to global distribution. It moved to sync licensing at scale. What it didn't move was its administrative infrastructure — which is still largely built on the assumption that rights are managed by a small team of people who all sit in the same office and can yell across the room to each other.

The result is an industry-wide metadata crisis. Berklee College of Music's Rethink Music research puts the value of uncollected and misdirected royalties at around $2.5 billion per year. That's not fraud. That's just broken systems — wrong ISRCs, missing splits, conflicting records across platforms that were never designed to talk to each other.

And the people who pay the price aren't the major labels with dedicated rights teams and legal departments. It's independent artists, small labels, boutique publishers, and the people building careers without a support system.

What Resolut Actually Does

We're not going to pretend this is magic. It's not. Good rights management is fundamentally about good information — having it, keeping it accurate, and being able to share it quickly with the right people.

What we built is a home for your catalog that treats your rights documentation as the asset it actually is. Your recordings and compositions live in Resolut with their ownership records, splits, ISRC and ISWC registrations, licensing history, and associated documentation all attached and organized. When something changes — a new co-writer, a new publishing deal, a sync license — the record updates and the history stays.

When a music supervisor emails at 11pm asking if a track is cleared for a Thursday edit, you can share a package with everything they need in about thirty seconds. When you're doing your annual royalty audit and trying to figure out why a track is underperforming, you have a single source of truth to check against rather than six different systems that might tell six different stories.

It sounds simple. It is, in design. But building something that's genuinely simple to use required solving a lot of genuinely hard problems about how rights information flows between artists, labels, publishers, distributors, and collection societies.

Who We Built This For

Resolut is for anyone who takes their catalog seriously — which in our experience includes a pretty wide range of people.

Independent artists who've been self-managing their rights on spreadsheets and are starting to feel the limitations of that approach. Small labels with growing rosters and no dedicated rights team. Music publishers handling catalogs with complex co-ownership arrangements. Managers who are sick of fielding rights questions they can't quickly answer. Sync agents who need their clients' paperwork to be presentation-ready at all times.

What they all have in common: they care about their work, they care about getting paid fairly for it, and they've spent too long fighting with their own administrative systems to do that.

The World We're Trying to Build

We genuinely believe that a well-functioning rights infrastructure isn't just good for business — it's good for music. When artists know their rights are protected and their paperwork is clean, they can take creative risks. When rights disputes resolve quickly instead of festering for years, relationships in the industry stay healthier. When royalties actually reach the people who earned them, more people can afford to keep making things.

That's a longer-term vision. The immediate version is simpler: we want the tools that help you manage your catalog to be as good as the tools that help you make music.

What's Live Now (and What's Coming)

Right now, you can use Resolut to build and manage your catalog, attach rights documentation to your assets, organize your recordings and compositions, and share bundles with collaborators and licensing partners. We have more to say about the specifics in upcoming posts — and the debug toolbar is genuinely fun, for those of you who like to see under the hood.

What's coming: deeper integration with PRO registration workflows, sync licensing pipeline tools, collaborator portals for multi-party catalogs, and a lot more. We're releasing on a steady cadence and we'll document everything here.

Come Build With Us

We're early. We know it. There are features we haven't built yet and edges we're still smoothing out. But the foundation is solid, the direction is clear, and we'd rather have you using it and telling us what's missing than wait until everything is perfect.

If you manage music rights and you're tired of the spreadsheet situation, come take a look. Tell us what you need. We're paying attention.

The catalog you've built deserves better infrastructure. So does the industry you're part of.