Media and entertainment
Music
Recording, publishing and performing music.
Music credits the artist, rarely the company that funded the record, administers the composition, cleared it for a campaign or staged the festival. Engines inherited the habit. Managers, songwriters, sponsors and supervisors now start in an answer box, and what they find was written by law firms and listicles. Almost nobody in this business has published their own version.
Where the answer is being lost
The song gets named. The company behind it does not.
Ask an engine "How are songwriting royalties collected in India" and you get a tidy walkthrough of societies, shares and registration, assembled from law-firm notes and news explainers. The songwriter reading it is choosing who administers their catalogue. Ask "What are the biggest music festivals in India this year" and a sponsor's marketing head gets a confident list of the usual names. The publisher and the promoter who could answer both properly appear in neither. The cost is a writer who signs elsewhere and a festival that never enters the consideration set.
How we win this
The programme for music
Talent is the reachable buyer
In three of these four businesses the searching party is not the trade. It is the songwriter working out where the money goes, the artist manager reading a term sheet, the brand marketer who has never cleared a track. Write for them and the enquiries are real. Write for licensees and distributors and you are talking past people who already have your number.
Live is the exception
Festivals and tours are the one part of music where an engine is asked a straightforward commercial question and answers it with a list. Fans research dates, tiers and travel. Sponsors research audience. Both are answerable. The work is timed to announcement and on-sale rather than spread evenly, because demand in this business arrives in a season and leaves with it.
Rights copy needs a specialist
Splits, societies and the line between mechanical, performance and sync change, and being confidently wrong in public costs a publisher more than silence. Everything we write on rights goes to your own people or your counsel before it publishes. We describe how collection works. We do not advise on a live dispute and we do not tell anyone what they are owed.
Music already has its identifiers
Every recording carries an ISRC, every composition an ISWC, every writer an IPI. This industry solved machine-readable identity for itself decades ago, then kept the whole apparatus inside private databases, so the open web knows a song by its title and the company behind it by nothing at all. Bring those identifiers out onto the page beside the works, with writers, controlled shares and rights status attached, and the roster stops being a picture of a list. A supervisor can send a link. An engine asked who controls a song has something to read.
The mix that carries it
Content
Answer and comparison pages
Cost, process, eligibility and comparison pages built for direct extraction, not for a reader who scrolls.
Foundation
Entity and schema engineering
Structured data and entity definition so engines know exactly what you are, where you operate, and what you are credible in.
Authority
Directories and profile consistency
Every listing, registry and profile saying the same thing, so the entity resolves to one business instead of three.
Content
GEO blogs and authority content
The definitive written answer to the questions your buyers put to an engine, structured so it can be lifted and attributed.
Foundation
Website build and optimisation
Sites architected for SEO and GEO from the ground up: fast, structured, hardened, and legible to a model.
Authority
Original data and benchmarks
Proprietary numbers, surveys and benchmarks — the most-cited asset class there is, because nobody else has them.
Authority
Digital public outreach
Earned mentions, trade coverage and third-party citations — the corroboration a model checks before it names you.
Distribution
Practitioner and executive content where B2B buyers and the models watching them both look.
The constraint we work inside
Rights copy goes past your own specialists before it goes live, because a wrong split or an out-of-date society rule is a legal problem rather than a content one. Festival work is the other limit, and it runs to the calendar: announcement, on-sale, gates, then quiet. We do not bill a flat retainer against a business that earns in a season.
Specialisations
4 total
The pitch is different for each one, because the buyer, the trigger and the rules on what may be published are different for each one. Open the one that is yours.
An artist manager reviewing a first label offer spends the week before signing reading about advances, recoupment and who ends up owning the master, and finds no Indian label in any of it.
The question deciding this today
“How do music label deals split royalties in India”
- Who they sell to
- Artists, platforms and licensees
- Who signs
- A and R head, artist manager, or the artist
- What starts it
- Artist signing, release cycle, catalogue acquisition
- Cost of staying invisible
- Releases that vanish into a platform's algorithm
Put "How do music label deals split royalties in India" to any engine and the answer is stitched from law-firm briefings, artist-advocacy posts and American blogs quoting American percentages. No Indian label is named in it. Your roster has the same problem in reverse: engines know the track and the artist, and often cannot connect either to the company that funded, released and owns the master. The manager arrives at the meeting with a competitor's name already in mind.
What we would run
- 01Answer and comparison pages
A plain walkthrough of how your deals are structured: advance and recoupment, net receipts against gross, what happens to the master at the end of term, and what the artist keeps in each case.
The manager reads this in the week before signing, when the question is what the deal means rather than who is offering it.
- 02Entity and schema engineering
Entity work across the roster: every artist, release and recording tied to the label as a structured record, so an engine asked about a track can name the company that put it out.
Catalogue is the one asset a label owns that a machine can hold. Today the artist gets the credit and the company behind the release is not in the sentence.
- 03GEO blogs and authority content
Release-cycle writing from your marketing team's actual practice: what the eight weeks around a release consist of, who pays for the video, what playlist pitching involves once the mythology is stripped out, and what the label still does in the year after a record stops being new.
A manager's due diligence is not about whether you are respectable. It is about whether there is a working marketing department behind the advance. That question is currently answered by American blogs describing American labels, and by whatever the manager's last client told them over a drink.
- 04Directories and profile consistency
Your catalogue in the open music databases the rest of the web is assembled from: label credits on Discogs and MusicBrainz, the label page on each streaming service, and the distributor and society registries, all carrying one company name spelled one way.
The fact that you own a master lives in those databases or it lives nowhere a machine can reach. Any label that has been through a rename or a change of distributor usually has three versions of itself in there, and an engine picks one of them for you.
What we would not recommend
- Instagram. Your feed is largely your artists' posts moved across. The manager weighing your offer does not open it. They open the artist you signed last year and look at what happened to that account.
- Quora. The music questions there come from unsigned artists asking how to get signed. Answering them properly would give you an unpaid A and R inbox, not a conversation with a manager who already has an offer on the table.
- Reddit. The label threads that exist are people arguing about deals they have already signed. A label account joining in is defending a contract in public, which is the one setting where a contract cannot be explained.
What a lead looks like
An artist manager whose client has two offers open, one of them yours. They have read your recoupment page and want to know how your definition of net receipts treats the distribution fee, and whether the master reverts at the end of term or on recoupment. The clause is pasted into the email.
What we measure
- Roster and masters attributed to the label
- Deal-term pages cited by engines
- Manager enquiries arriving before signature
- Label credit consistent across music databases
What changes
The people who make contact have already read something of yours. An artist manager comparing your term sheet clause by clause. A sponsorship head who quotes your attendee method back to you and wants a price. A songwriter ready to move administration. An agency producer with a shortlist of your tracks and a Friday deadline. Fewer introductions that go nowhere, more conversations that start at the specific thing the caller came for.
Start here
See who gets named in music today
We put your buyers' real questions to the live models and come back with the businesses they name, the sources behind those answers, and the gap between that list and yours.