Our RPX services are built upon our highly adaptable Royalty Producer X system series. Every customer is administered by a personal operator on his own, private server and can access his system and all the data at any time, over the internet. We configure each system individually and can adapt logic, input and output to the customer's needs in record time, at reasonable costs.

As an industry-only, we allow our customers to download their complete data set at any time. Additionally, we offer a buy-out option, where you can buy the fully working and well maintained system, so you can install and run the system on your own hardware or cloud infrastructure.

On this page you can find more information about the underlying software system, Royalty Producer X.

Due to our heritage of serving the music industry for over two decades, we developed many features to help long standing record labels move over their classic contract structure into the era of internet music sales. Some artist contracts just can't be renegotiated, so we invested a lot of experitse to find viable solutions for contractual setups like: escalations (sliding shares), PPD vs. NET prices, budget, low budget and sellout deductions and more.

The dashboard can show current charts and system messages. Several charts are available and the reporting period can be set by the user:

   Sales Per Month
   Top Ten Countries
   Top Ten Channels
   Top Ten Accounts
   Top Ten Stores

System Messages will be shown on certain events: Warnings about expiring contracts, process completion messages and others.

Import metadata directly into RPX. All you need is a CSV, text/tab or Excel file with typical, industry-standard information like Barcode, Product Artist, Product Title, ISRC, Track Artist and Track Title.

The internals of RPX are generally referencing items as being either a bundle or an asset. So companies outside the music business can easily use the same structure. Instead of building "albums" with "tracks, you can as well administer "font sets" with "fonts" or a "photo gallery", consisting of multiple "stock photographs".

RPX has some great automation features that allow the user to not only import "dumb" metadata, but to easily enrich the data on the fly and add contacts, new accounts (based on a template) and to wire all information correctly, in one import step. The need for manual entries is reduced to a minimum. Most of the time the user only has to adapt some percentages in a newly created account.
 

Account Groups are used to accumulate multiple accounts into one royalty statement for a recipient. As the name implies, multiple accounts can be gathered into an account group to cross-colateralise all accounts. This part of the system also allows the user to manually input advances or special royalty income, beside the royalties being generated by sales reports. All statement claims and payments are listed to show the current balance.
 

Accounts hold the actual shares that need to be payed when an item was sold. To speed up the process of adding new accounts, RPX offers unlimited, user definable templates to work with. Bundles and assets are handled separately. The contract structure can be build by combining any set of country group, bundle or asset type and sales type. All types can be set up individually and we usually help new customers with the process of determining the necessary types to reflect their grown contract structure.

We developed a new approach to escalations (sliding scales): By defining escalation sets, sales for multiple, specific contract lines can be tied together and influence the scale to use. For instance, domestic sales can be looked at in a separate escalation set than exports or only domestic sales could use escalations. Additionally, sales of every separate sales type can be "translated" into unit equivalents that are usually album sales. So a physical album sales and a digital album download can have their usual value of "1", while Streams have to reach 2000 sold units in order to represent an "album" sale. We call this "unit equivalents" and this can be set up for each contract line, separately.

There are three types of escalation sets that consider different values: "units", "turnover" and "royalties". While the "unit" type represents the classical form of doing escalations, "turnover" and "royalties" are more modern approaches to the idea of paying higher rates when business is doing well. When choosing "turnover", the royalty rate will grow, when a certain turnover is reached. The "royalties" type orientates itself on paid royalties, directly. This feature can also help to depict certain "investment" deals, where you may want to show sales developments on statement, but only start paying royalties, when a certain turnover has been reached. The other way around (at the investor's contract), you can only pay until a certain turnover is reached to then halt any further payments.
 

Royalty statements are created and administered in the statements module. The list view shows all important details about the statements: totals, payment and delivery status. You can create statements at any time (e.g. to plan your cash flow) for some or all contacts. When using RPX for multiple companies, each contact belongs to one of these companies and you can filter the contacts by company, too.

During statement creation, RPX is generating all accompanying files as defined in the account groups: PDFs, Excel and CSV files are available. The files are then ready to view and can be opened with a single click.

A built-in automation feature even allows you to send your statements via email from RPX, directly. The body text is created on-the-fly and includes the list of files that are attached as one single zip file. The delivery process can be fine-tuned by allowing pauses between chunks of emails. This circumvents problems with many hosting companies that try to prevent spam by reducing the amount of emails being sent in a period of time.

The statement PDFs are available in 3 different forms: minimal, compact and detailed (where the detail and length of the statement grows from minimal to detailed). Every PDF version does NOT show all sales lines, but a certain, grouped view. This is the only way to deliver meaningful PDFs as they could reach thousands of pages in the the age of streaming music. RPX therefore adds a sales details file to the equation. This file shows all original sales data, including web stores and countries.

The language, layout, interval and royalty period can be adjusted individually, on a per contact basis. If you have to deal with artists that constantly forget to invoice you the statement amount, you can switch on automatic "self-invoicing" to let RPX generate a corresponding, internal invoice for your finance department for payout.
 

Channels are the source of sales reports. These can be distributors, aggregators, licensees or even your own web shop. A channel can be assigned to a specific sales import slot and offers several other settings to ease the way for recurring imports of sales from the same source.

When importing sales from an aggregator, RPX allows you to also import the actual web store (DSP) name. This name can be shown on the royalty statements and you can also use the store name for reporting and charting. E.g. You import a sales report from TheOrchard (Channel). Each line of the report shows the store that sold the content: Apple Music, Amazon, Spotify, etc. We took this idea even further and RPX can now "translate" reported web stores into system web stores. This comes handy under two circumstances: First, some services report many names for basically the same web store (e.g. Amazon JP, Amazon US, etc.) and some web stores are so small that one would rather tie them under a common "others" entry. Translating reported web stores also adds the possibility to seamlessly switch aggregators, without your licensors noting the change.

RPX offers extensive settings for physical sales reports. The reported sales data can be post processed to obtain PPDs or NET prices that can be crucial for royalty calculations: The PPD can be calculated from a reported NET price and the NET price can be calculated from a reported PPD. Additionally, each channel can have its own pricing code table that will translate reported price codes into PPDs and NET prices during import.

RPX supports the historical idea of paying different shares to the licensor, when the initial high price of a product starts to fall off, in multiple ways. First, a reported sales type like "budget" or "sell out" can be re-used during import by "translating" it into a system sales type. Second, a per bundle setting can define the high price and the corresponding deviations of it to declare lower priced items, accordingly (e.g. set the high price for a specific bundle to be 8 USD, if reported price falls below 70% of 8 USD, declare as budget sales). Finally, the user can set up a period per bundle to control the sales type in a given period. This feature is also useful to mimic the classic "advertising reduction".
 

Sales are the basis for your royalty statements. RPX is highly optimised to import sales from different channels. A sales report in RPX states the reporting channel, the sales period, the royalty period, the currency and a payment status. RPX can handle any incoming currency. When setting the payment status to "paid", RPX will convert every sales line into your home currency. The user can either slet RPX use the latest exchange rate for the reported currency, or enter the real amount of money that was actually received from the reporting channel. This is helpful when dealing with external currencies that do not only have a varying exchange rates, but payments are reduced by additional bank and transaction fees. Just enter the real amount received and RPX will do the rest.

RPX allows the separation of a SALES PERIOD and a ROYALTY PERIOD. The sales period will always be shown on statement details for documentation purposes. The royalty period gives the user full control over the moment, when a sales report should make it into royalty statements.

All imported sales files are saved as a copy inside the system, for audit trail purposes. To reduce the size of the database, these files are save externally, on your hard disk and not in the database itself. RPX can handle a growing number of sales lines in the future by automatically archiving sales in a separate database. You can "clean up" your sales reports from time to time by "locking" reports if they are not used for royalty calculation anymore. This frees up space in the "live" sales database and keeps the royalty system snappy. The historical sales will still be available for business intelligence in the Analytics module and locked sales reports can be "unlocked" again in the future, if necessary.
 

Multiple setting tabs allow you to customise RPX. We guide you through this process, personally, after having discussed and analysed your business and contract structure.

Royalties: Setup your central royalty rules and account templates for re-use.

Contacts: Insert the standard values to be used for newly created contacts: currency, language, taxation, payout limits and other royalty statement options.

Language: RPX can handle two languages for you at the same time. While the software's interface is always presented in English, the outgoing royalty statements can be either presented in English or your home language. Just replace the words in the settings to match your needs. The language used on the statements can be set individually, per contact.

Layout: RPX allows you to personalise your documents by using your own logo and footer text. When using the multi-company option, each company can have its own logo and footer text to be put on a statement.

Currencies: All currencies of the world are ready to use inside Fox. But to reduce clutter, the user can select the currencies he is actually dealing with. The current exchange rates for all currencies can be imported from the web with a mouse click or even automatically, on startup. RPX can optionally calculate withholding taxes (WHT reports). You can set up the WHT rates on this screen.

Recurring Fees: Set up recurring fees for assets and bundles, separately. The name of the fees is user definable. The system can be told to add recurring fees to newly added metadata, automatically or manually. Recurring fees will be generated on a monthly basis and can be switched on and off on a bundle or asset basis

EMail: You can set up RPX to use either your mail client (Apple Mail on Mac OS or Outlook on Windows) or to send emails through your SMPT server, directly. The eMail text to use on royalty statements can be entered here for two languages: English (system) and Home (your language). Multiple merge fields are available to enrich the subject and body text, meaningfully (e.g. Period, Statement No., etc.)

US Mechanicals: RPX offers an optional US Mechanical system with two operating modes: "Classic" is based on the typical calculation of mechanicals and reporting to HFA and publishers. The classic mode also offers a separate, MX (Mexican) statutory rate. The "Pre-Paid" mode allows modern, digital native companies to license digital sales in advance and keep a balance per song. When the balance runs low, a reminder can be issued, so you don't miss to recharge your credit. The two modes can not be mixed.

Sales Import: RPX can offer up to 30 import slots for digital sales and up to 20 slots for physical sales reports, which support PPD and NET prices, including complex post processing. RPX comes with two built-in comfort imports for Apple (reports from iTunes connect) and GooglePlay, where multiple reports for a period can be processed at once, including the paid totals in your home currency.

While charts look pretty and give a fast overview of your business situation, reports offer a deeper insight into your sales data. RPX allows you to filter sales by country, channel, store, account and period and gives you detailed information that can be viewed, printed or exported with one mouse click.

By selecting your point of view, the aggregated reports can give you just the data you need for decision making. First you enter the search filters to focus on a specific data set. Then you select your aggregation point. For example: Select all sales for a year for one account, then choose "country" as the aggregation point: You will see in which countries this specific account performed well in the given period.

Analytics can be conducted over the sales and royalty databases, giving deep insight into both, raw income data and paid royalties.

RPX (Royalty Producer X) is based on the latest FileMaker technology and runs on:
  macOS 10.12-10.14
  Windows 7-10 (pro editions).

Our apps were built with speed in mind. Nevertheless, the software has to deal with lots of data and big files. As every database-centric software, it loves a fast disc system. So here are our recommendations. They are equal for Macintosh and Windows computers:

  a recent computer, not older than 4 years
  a Core i3 or better processor
  a minimum of 8GB of RAM
  an SSD (highly recommended)

We do not recommend using Windows 10 Home in a professional business environment, based on the history of problems with automatic updates from Microsoft. Windows 10 Pro allows the user to postpone updates to a later, safer date, when all obvious bugs are already ironed out.

Deployment Options

We do not force you into any financial black box: You can BUY our software or RENT it.
We do not dictate how you use our software: On your PERSONAL COMPUTER or in the CLOUD, as a "Desktop As A Service" deployment.
Read more about deployment options
 

Services

We offer free business analysis before you buy, training, custom features and help with preparing your data to make it fit for a professional royalty solutions.
Read more about our services