Executive summary
Generating royalty claims is one of the most important and complicated steps in the music royalty process. It determines who gets paid, how much they should receive, and how revenue is divided between different rights holders across countries and ownership agreements.
Stage needed a reliable way to combine large volumes of streaming and broadcast records with constantly changing rights ownership data and royalty rules. Manual workflows were slow, difficult to manage, and often led to missed claims, disputes, or payment errors.
Helmes helped Stage build an automated claim-generation platform that combines matched usage data with the latest ownership information and applies configurable claim rules to calculate royalty shares. The solution was designed to handle complex ownership structures and country-specific requirements while keeping every calculation fully traceable.
The platform reduced claim generation time from days to hours while improving claim coverage and reducing incorrectly calculated or missing claims. Legal, finance, and royalty teams gained much better visibility into how claims were generated and where the underlying data came from.
As a result, music societies and publishers could process royalty distributions more efficiently, while rights holders benefited from faster and more reliable royalty distributions.
Meet the customer
Stage Enterprises is a London-based company on a mission to change the lives of music makers, labels, publishers and entire communities by fixing the broken royalty pipelines in the music industry.
In 2018, the company partnered with Helmes (under the Telesoftas brand) to build a music data platform that utilizes the latest technologies to exchange and process music data and provide fair pay to authors.
Together, we tackled the music industry’s biggest data challenges by building a robust data ingestion pipeline that handles an ever-growing range of data sources and scales seamlessly with usage growth.
The challenge
Once music usage has been ingested and matched to the correct works, the next critical step is calculating who is entitled to receive what share of the revenue.
Music societies and publishers needed an automated and auditable way to generate claim sets — the basis for invoices and royalty distributions — using matched music records and constantly changing rights ownership structures, known as the “share picture”.
Manual processes were difficult to scale and often resulted in delays, inconsistencies, missed claims, and additional operational overhead.
The process
We worked closely with the client’s teams to understand how rights ownership information changes over time, how conflicts are handled, and how claim rules should be prioritised.
We then designed a system that can reliably combine usage with current rights information, apply jurisdiction-specific rules, and output distributable shares for each party.
The whole development process consisted of the following steps:
- Quick start: Reviewing existing claiming logic, data flows, and known pain points
- Analysis: Modelling share picture structures and legal constraints
- Rule design: Co-creating configurable rules with legal/royalty teams
- Development: Building and testing the rule engine, usage-to-share joining, and claim generation logic
- Validation: Running parallel comparisons against legacy systems
- Deployment: Delivering cloud-based, API-accessible claims engine
The solution
Helmes built an automated claim-generation engine that converts matched music records into structured royalty claims ready for invoicing and distribution.
The platform automates the claim generation process by:
- Retrieving matched music records together with metadata such as listening volumes and revenue values.
- Fetching the latest rights data for each musical work, including ownership shares, contributor roles, society assignments, and effective dates.
- Applying configurable claim rules to determine how revenue should be divided between rights holders across different roles, territories, and ownership structures. The rules also support overlapping rights scenarios, such as composer vs lyricist allocations and national vs international splits.
- Generating structured claim sets that show the amounts to be invoiced or distributed to each rights holder, ready for downstream invoicing and payout workflows.
The solution also provides full traceability of every calculation, allowing legal, finance, and royalty teams to review how claims were generated and verify the underlying source data.
Benefits
Thanks to the solution, claim generation time was reduced from days to hours.
Transparency and traceability improved significantly. Every value in a claim set could be traced back to its original usage record, match, and ownership source.
Claim coverage also improved, reducing the number of unclaimed or incorrectly calculated royalties.
Automated reconciliation with finance systems enabled faster invoicing and fewer errors, while legal and royalty teams gained better visibility into disputes through full claim traceability.
As a result, rights holders received more accurate and complete payments, increasing trust and satisfaction.
- €4.56B in original royalty value (ORV) claimed
- €19.7M processed in a single cycle, with €8.8M distributed
- €114M in total royalties distributed
Technologies
Helmes used AWS to support scalable processing of royalty calculations and automated claim-generation workflows across large volumes of matched music usage data.
Snowflake served as the central data platform for combining usage records with ownership information, processing complex royalty allocation rules, and generating structured claim datasets for downstream invoicing and distribution systems.
The technologies were selected to support reliable high-volume processing, traceable calculations, and flexible handling of evolving royalty and ownership rules.
Helmes’s expertise in building data pipelines
Royalty claim generation requires more than simply processing large volumes of records. Ownership information changes constantly, rights can overlap across territories and contributors, and every calculation must remain transparent and traceable.
To address this, we helped Stage build a platform that combines automation with clear oversight. The solution was designed to handle complex royalty rules reliably while still allowing legal, finance, and royalty teams to understand how claims were generated and where each value originated.
Our experience in music rights and large-scale data workflows helped create a system that can adapt as ownership structures, business rules, and industry requirements evolve. Rather than locking teams into rigid workflows, the platform allows users to refine rules, review decisions, and maintain control over the claiming process.
Work with us
Smart claim-generation systems can help organisations manage complex rights structures, shared revenue models, and large-scale payment workflows more accurately and efficiently. This is especially valuable for publishing societies, licensing agencies, gaming platforms, and other businesses that handle split payments between multiple contributors or rights holders.
Helmes helps organisations automate complex operational workflows, improve transparency, and build scalable data-driven platforms tailored to industry-specific requirements.
If you are looking for a partner for data-intensive or digitalisation projects, we’d be happy to hear from you.
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