Executive summary
Royalty statements are one of the most visible parts of the royalty process. They determine how clearly rights holders can understand their payments, verify calculations, and trust the distribution process behind them.
Stage needed a reliable way to generate and deliver large volumes of royalty statements across different reporting formats, territories, and stakeholder requirements. The existing process involved significant manual work, complex adjustment handling, and limited transparency for both operational teams and rights holders.
Helmes helped Stage build an automated royalty distribution and statement-generation platform that transforms royalty claim data into structured payouts and stakeholder-ready statements.
The solution automates statement generation, applies distribution and adjustment rules, supports industry-standard formats such as CRD and BSDL, and securely delivers statements through multiple channels.
As a result, distribution and finance teams reduced manual operational work, while support and legal teams saw fewer disputes and clarification requests due to clearer and more consistent reporting.
Rights holders also gained better visibility into their payouts and received 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
Generating royalty statements involved multiple reporting standards, delivery formats, adjustment rules, and stakeholder-specific requirements.
Music societies and publishers needed to produce industry-standard outputs such as CRD and BSDL statements, automate delivery workflows, and manage overpayments, underpayments, and retroactive adjustments across large volumes of royalty data.
Before this solution, the process relied heavily on manual work and fragmented workflows, making distributions slower, harder to scale, and more difficult to manage consistently.
The process
We began by analysing existing distribution workflows, statement formats, and the causes of manual intervention. We then built an automated distribution engine that:
- Ingests claim results from the collection stage
- Applies distribution logic and adjustment rules
- Formats outputs for delivery (PDFs, XML, CRD, BSDL)
- Automates delivery to stakeholders
- Allows users to review, audit, and trigger corrections where needed
The solution
The solution automates the generation and delivery of royalty statements, handling multiple formats, complex adjustments, and secure delivery.
The system performs various steps:
1. Data ingestion
The platform pulls finalised claim data via APIs from the collection stage and combines it with beneficiary metadata, such as names, addresses, banking details, and preferred statement formats or languages.
2. Statement generation
The system generates royalty statements in standard formats (e.g., CRD, BSDL) or custom templates.
Statements are grouped by party, period, and source of income and include details, such as usage type, revenue share and prior adjustments.
3. Automated delivery
The platform securely delivers statements via SFTP, email, or web portal, with support for delivery status tracking and confirmations.
4. Adjustments engine
The adjustments engine automatically identifies and applies adjustments due to rights conflicts, updated share data and retroactive usage or corrections.
It generates offset statements that roll into the next payment cycle or are flagged for review.
Benefits
Thanks to the solution, rights holders began receiving timely, standardised royalty statements and gained greater transparency over their payouts.
Distribution and finance teams benefited from automation and reporting tools, reducing manual workload and lowering operational costs. At the same time, legal and support teams saw fewer queries and disputes due to clear and consistent statements.
Adjustments were handled proactively and transparently, reducing legal and reputational risk. As a result, the organisation could meet compliance standards in multiple jurisdictions without manual workarounds.
- 487 validated/approved financial reports
- 223 historical usage months managed across 16 usage segments
- 8 current usage months actively processed
Technologies
Helmes used AWS services, including S3, Lambda, and SNS to support scalable generation, processing, and secure delivery of royalty statements across multiple distribution channels. Snowflake served as the central data platform for preparing, combining, and transforming royalty payment and beneficiary data across large datasets.
Helmes’s expertise in building data pipelines
We helped Stage build a reliable distribution engine that transforms raw claim data into stakeholder-ready payouts with full traceability and control.
As the client’s digitalisation partner, we combined deep technical expertise with domain knowledge of music rights reporting and standards. We didn’t just deliver formatted files – we built a distribution platform that scales, understands legal and operational edge cases, and is flexible enough to adapt to changing requirements.
Most vendors offer either a royalty platform or a reporting engine. We offer both, integrated seamlessly and tailored to each client’s regulatory, contractual, and user-facing needs. Our system is configurable, transparent, and production-ready – not a toolkit that clients have to finish themselves.
Work with us
Automating royalty distribution and reporting workflows helps organisations reduce manual operational work, improve payout transparency, and deliver clearer reporting to rights holders and partners.
These challenges are common not only in music rights and royalty distribution, but also in industries where complex financial, compliance, or partner reporting processes must operate reliably at scale.
Helmes helps such organisations build secure, scalable platforms for data processing, reporting, and operational automation that can adapt as business and regulatory requirements evolve.
If you are looking for a partner for complex data or digitalisation initiatives, we’d be happy to hear from you.
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