Stop Fighting with Spreadsheets: A Guide to Curve Lite for Independent Publishers

If you’ve ever tried to manage music publishing royalties manually, you know it can be a nightmare. You get a statement from a PRO in one format, a sub-publisher in another, and a DSP in a third. Trying to mash those together into a coherent report for a songwriter usually involves a lot of coffee and a high risk of errors.

Enter: Curve Lite. Curve Lite is built for small to medium size publishers looking to streamline their royalty accounting, without a requirement for advanced features. 

What does Curve Lite offer?

The core of the system is about moving away from manual data entry and manipulation. Here’s a breakdown of the workflow and features:

1. The Data Ingestion

Instead of having to reformat every CSV you receive to normalise the data, Curve will do this for you on file ingestion. Curve Lite has a library of file ingestion templates, built to ingest and normalise data from hundreds of sources. When you get a royalty statement from a partner or a PRO, you just upload it. The system recognises the file source, ingests the data based on the template settings, maps the earnings to the right songs, and flags any unmatched income or missing data. It can even transform data or fill in gaps in the data when ingesting the files. This is usually where people save the most time - it turns hours of data cleaning into an automated process.

2. Improving the Royalty Workflow

Curve’s mission is simple: make royalties better. We aim to simplify the royalty ingestion and calculation workflow and provide clear, understandable data for your team to work with. Our Unmapped Page allows you to bulk review and map royalties to songs, and our Reports area lets you build custom reports on your income data and royalty data to cover anything from metadata reviews to income analysis.

3. Giving Writers a Dashboard

One of the best features is the Creator Dashboard. Rather than just emailing a file, you can give your songwriters their own portal login. They can jump in at any time to download their statements, or use Analytics and Reports to dive into their earnings. Your writers can now analyse their income, breaking down exactly where the money came from so you aren't stuck answering "where did this $12.50 come from?" queries every statement period. Curve Lite’s Creator Dashboard makes your statement process easier, more professional and more transparent.

4. Seeing the Big Picture

When your data is trapped in separate spreadsheets, it's hard to see trends. Curve Lite has built-in Analytics that let you look at your whole business, creating custom reports to fit your needs. You can see which songs are performing best over time or which territories are bringing in the most revenue. This helps you figure out where to focus your energy for future deals, or identify gaps in your royalty collection.

What’s the damage? 

Curve Lite uses a bundle system so you only pay for the size of your catalogue. It’s designed to grow with you rather than hitting you with a flat fee upfront.

The Base Rate: Curve Lite starts at £20 per month. This covers one bundle, which includes up to 15 contracts and 300 songs (catalogue items).

Scaling Up: When you exceed the limits to a bundle, another bundle is added on top. For example: If you hit 16 contracts, you move to a second bundle (which brings the cost to £40/month). If you have a larger catalog, say 1,000 songs and 50 contracts, you’d be looking at 4 bundles, which is £80/month.

The Trial: We offer a 14-day free trial when signing up to Curve Lite. 

The Discount: We believe the best way to set you up for success on Curve is to take our Curve Accelerator video course. We strongly encourage any Curve Lite subscriber to take this course, and to give you an extra nudge we’re offering one month of Curve Lite for free when you complete the course! Simply sign up, complete the video course, and we will give you one month of Curve Lite for free*, on top of your two week free trial (*one free month per Curve client).

Is it worth it?

If you are spending too much time and effort sorting through Excel spreadsheets, normalising data from different sources, manually emailing statements to your writers or answering questions about their statements then yes, Curve Lite can absolutely help you save time and effort. 

Why not sign up to the free trial to see what Curve Lite can do for you?

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