How an independent distributor used Resolut to manage a rapidly growing catalog while maintaining accurate rights data.
When Wavelength Distribution started out, their catalog fit in a spreadsheet. Two years later, that same spreadsheet had become the thing everyone dreaded opening. This is the story of how they replaced it.
Wavelength Distribution is an independent music distribution company based in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2019 by a small team of music industry veterans who'd spent years at larger labels, Wavelength was built around a simple premise: give independent artists and small labels the same distribution reach as the majors, without the gatekeeping.
By early 2023, Wavelength was distributing music for 340 artists and labels across 45+ DSPs. Their catalog had grown to roughly 3,000 tracks — a number that felt manageable, until it didn't.
The team operated with five full-time staff and a rotating cast of contractors. Their rights management setup was a patchwork: a combination of a commercial music distribution platform (which handled DSP delivery but had limited rights tracking), a shared Google Sheet for ownership splits, and a folder-based system on Google Drive for master recordings and metadata PDFs. It had worked fine at 500 tracks. At 3,000, every quarter-end royalty cycle had become a two-week ordeal.
The specific incident that forced the issue happened in Q3 2023. A mid-sized label on their roster — about 200 tracks — signed a new licensing deal that required updating territory restrictions on 87 of their assets. Wavelength's operations director, Marcus Reyes, describes what happened next:
"We spent three days tracking down the right versions of the metadata files. Some of it was in the spreadsheet, some of it was in notes in Google Drive, some of it was just in someone's email. We updated what we thought was everything, and two weeks later the label calls us because three of the tracks are still showing up in the wrong territories on Spotify. We'd updated the spreadsheet but hadn't pushed the changes through to the delivery layer. We had no audit trail. We didn't even know when those records had last been touched."
It wasn't a catastrophic failure — no one got sued, no money was lost. But it was the clearest possible signal that the process didn't scale. The team was spending more time managing the system than using it.
Wavelength spent about six weeks evaluating options. They looked at three platforms: an enterprise rights management system designed for major labels (quickly ruled out — the pricing assumed a much larger operation and the onboarding required a dedicated implementation partner), a newer startup product with strong DSP delivery features but limited ownership and splits functionality, and Resolut.
What made Resolut stand out, according to Marcus, was the combination of bulk import capabilities and the ownership split modeling. "We needed to be able to bring in a big catalog without re-entering everything by hand, and we needed a system that actually understood splits at the asset level — not just at the release level. Most tools treat splits as a reporting concept. Resolut treats them as a first-class data model."
The team also ran a practical test: they exported 200 tracks from their existing system, reformatted the metadata into Resolut's CSV template, and ran a trial bulk upload. The validation report came back with 23 errors — mostly ISRC format inconsistencies they hadn't known existed in their data. That was a feature, not a problem. "It found things our old system had quietly accepted and stored wrong for two years," Marcus said.
Wavelength chose a phased migration approach. Rather than attempting to move all 3,000 tracks at once, they prioritized by label activity level.
Phase 1 (Weeks 1–3): The 15 most active labels on the roster, representing about 800 tracks. These were the catalogs generating the most royalty activity and therefore the most operational pain. The team used Resolut's bulk upload workflow, uploading in batches of 100–200 tracks at a time to keep validation reports readable.
Phase 2 (Weeks 4–8): The remaining 2,200 tracks, plus historical metadata cleanup. The Resolut team's onboarding support was available during this phase to help interpret edge cases in the validation pipeline — particularly around ISWC codes for older catalog items where the composition metadata was incomplete.
Phase 3 (Weeks 9–12): Decommissioning the old system. The team kept the Google Sheets running in read-only mode for 30 days after migration as a reference, then archived them. The Google Drive folder structure was retained but linked to asset records in Resolut rather than being the source of truth.
Total migration time: 11 weeks. The team had projected 16 weeks based on the size of the catalog, so they came in meaningfully under estimate — largely because Resolut's validation tooling surfaced data quality issues early rather than partway through the process.
Eighteen months after completing the migration, Wavelength's catalog had grown from 3,000 tracks to just over 50,000 — a combination of organic artist growth and three label acquisitions they were able to absorb without adding headcount in operations.
| Metric | Before Resolut | After Resolut | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quarterly royalty cycle duration | 12–14 business days | 3–4 business days | ~75% reduction |
| Metadata error rate (per audit) | ~8.4% of assets had at least one metadata error | ~0.6% of assets | 93% reduction |
| Time to process a label acquisition (onboarding new catalog) | 3–5 weeks | 4–7 business days | ~80% reduction |
| Catalog size supported by same operations headcount | ~3,000 tracks | 50,000+ tracks | 16x scale |
| Ownership split disputes per quarter | 6–9 per quarter | 0–1 per quarter | ~90% reduction |
| Staff time on catalog maintenance (weekly avg) | ~22 hours/week across team | ~5 hours/week across team | 77% reduction |
The reduction in ownership split disputes is the number Marcus cites most often when talking about the migration's impact. "Splits are where the money is, and where the arguments happen. When everyone can see the same source of truth in real time — artists, managers, co-writers — the disputes mostly stop before they start."
A few specific capabilities drove the most meaningful results for Wavelength's team.
Bulk upload with validation pipeline. The ability to import large batches with structured error reporting changed how the team approached catalog onboarding entirely. Instead of treating each new label acquisition as a bespoke manual project, they developed a standardized onboarding template that maps any incoming metadata export into Resolut's CSV format. New acquisitions now follow a repeatable playbook.
Asset-level ownership splits. Resolut's splits model allows Wavelength to document ownership at the individual track level, including territory-specific variations. For a distributor managing catalogs across multiple rights holders, this granularity is essential — and rare in tools aimed at independent distributors.
Audit trail. Every change to an asset's metadata, splits, or territory settings is logged with a timestamp and user. This turned out to matter more than the team expected: label clients increasingly ask for change history as part of their own compliance requirements.
Bundle management. The ability to group assets into bundles — by album, by campaign, by licensing package — and apply bulk operations at the bundle level saved significant time on the day-to-day catalog management tasks that used to require touching individual records.
Wavelength is currently planning two initiatives that build directly on their Resolut foundation. The first is launching a self-service portal for their artist and label clients — a read-only view into their own catalog data, splits, and royalty attribution. The second is expanding into sync licensing, which requires the kind of detailed rights and territory documentation that would have been impossible to maintain under their old system.
"The catalog we have now, we couldn't have managed it the way we were working before," Marcus says. "We would have hit a ceiling at maybe 8,000 tracks and either had to hire a lot more people or stop growing. Instead we scaled 16x on the same team. That's the part of the ROI story that's hardest to put in a spreadsheet."
Wavelength Distribution is a real-world composite based on the experiences of multiple Resolut customers. Specific metrics reflect actual outcomes from similar-scale migrations. Company and individual names are fictional.
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