Granting permission and maintaining rights for all parties
As an artist you want to protect your creative work, however you probably also want to commercialize it. As a label, you’ll want to have permission to commercialize artists’ music and also properly compensate them for it. Labelcaster has devised a unique system where every release has a distribution license tied to it. That license grants the label the rights to distribute music to digital services while retaining the artists’ ownership and also establishes for all participants the split percentages on royalties generated from those recordings. Later, when royalties come in, Labelcaster reports and pays out royalties based on those agreements to all parties.
While this adds an extra step in setting up releases, it ensures that all parties get the permissions they need, maintain their rights and ownership and receive mutually agreed upon compensation for their work.
It works like this:
- The label sets up a release with all the right data like audio, cover arts, metadata, targets and so forth.
- Artists involved with the release are invited to join Labelcaster by the label and create accounts.
- A digital distribution license agreement with split percentages spelled out is created when the release is created inside of the Labelcaster platform.
- That agreement is sent by Labelcaster for e-signature to all parties.
- Once signed, the release is delivered out to DSPs and eventually released.
- When reporting and royalties come in from the DSPs, Labelcaster distributes to all parties according to the contract.
Convenience and flexibility—use Labelcaster’s Licensing Agreement or your own
We’ve built a template agreement that takes care of all the licensing. When you the label owner, set up the release, you’ll be prompted to create a licensing contract. You can use our template where you add the artists and their split amounts (we call all spit participants artists), rights period, territories. Once you are done, the Labelcaster system handles the e-signing of the documents by all the participants—sending emails, keeping pdf copies, etc. Our template is simple, clean and protects all parties.
However, if you already have an agreement or want to use your own terms, when creating the contract, you’ll upload your own signed licensing agreement that will be archived with the release. If you go this route, you’ll still set up splits; a simple split agreement will be sent by our system to all participants for approval.
Multiple License Agreement (MLA)—agreeing to terms ahead of time
If you have artists you work with who use the same terms and splits for their releases, you can use our Multiple License release function to avoid going through the approval and signature process for each of their releases. The Multiple License Agreement (MLA) found in your Legal Department establishes those ongoing terms.
Multiple License Agreement