How a Major Label Streamlined Rights Management

The Challenge

A top-five major label was managing rights data for a catalog of over two million recordings across dozens of territories. Their legacy system relied on disconnected spreadsheets, email threads, and a decades-old internal database that could not handle modern metadata standards.

Rights processing took an average of fourteen days per release. Ownership conflicts were discovered late in the process, causing delays in distribution and lost revenue. The label needed a centralized platform that could scale with their catalog and integrate with their existing distribution pipeline.

Goals

The label set three primary objectives for their rights management overhaul. First, reduce average rights processing time from fourteen days to under five. Second, eliminate ownership conflicts before assets reach distribution. Third, provide a single source of truth accessible to all internal teams and external partners.

The Solution

After evaluating several platforms, the label chose Resolut for its combination of flexible rights modeling, real-time collaboration, and API-driven architecture.

Migration Strategy

The migration was executed in three phases. The first phase covered the active catalog — approximately 200,000 recordings released in the past two years. The second phase brought in the back catalog by decade, prioritizing the most commercially active titles. The third phase connected Resolut to the label's distribution and royalty systems via API.

Resolut's bulk import tools processed CSV files containing up to 50,000 rows at a time. Built-in validation caught 12,000 metadata inconsistencies during the first import alone, issues that had existed undetected in the legacy system for years.

Team Adoption

The label rolled out Resolut to four departments: A&R, legal, catalog management, and finance. Each team received role-based access configured to show only the data and actions relevant to their function.

A&R teams used bundles to assemble releases and assign preliminary splits. Legal teams reviewed and finalized rights documentation. Catalog management maintained ongoing metadata quality. Finance used reporting dashboards to reconcile royalty statements against rights data.

The Results

Within six months of completing the migration, the label achieved measurable improvements across all three objectives.

Processing Time

Average rights processing time dropped from fourteen days to three and a half days, a reduction of 75%. The biggest gains came from automated ownership validation and real-time collaboration, which eliminated the back-and-forth email chains that had previously dominated the workflow.

Data Quality

Ownership conflicts detected at the point of entry increased by 90%, meaning issues were caught and resolved before reaching distribution. The number of post-release rights disputes dropped to near zero for new releases processed through Resolut.

Operational Efficiency

By consolidating rights data into a single platform, the label eliminated four redundant internal tools and reduced the manual effort required for quarterly royalty reconciliation by roughly 40%.