Photo Credit: Saydung89
The music industry faces a bevy of challenges in 2025 – as we’ll cover exhaustively in the pages of Digital Music News – but ensuring accurate and timely payments to rights owners shouldn’t be one of them. In partnership with Tipalti, we’ve created a guide to address this issue: introducing our playbook on How to Pay People In the Music Industry.
The global music industry is now projected to exceed $100 billion in annual revenue, though payment structures and splits are becoming a lot more complicated. You can’t wing it anymore: the complexity of accounts payable in the music industry necessitates robust financial platforms and partnerships to guarantee prompt and precise payments.
To address this critical music industry need, Digital Music News and Tipalti have collaborated to provide a comprehensive playbook for streamlining payments in the music industry. This guide offers solutions for payment challenges faced by music businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises. We hope it offers some critical tips to companies in any industry sub-category, as well as entrepreneurs, investors, and music platforms of all varieties.
The playbook is available here – and it’s a great guide for plotting out your entire accounts payable stack or simply upgrading your existing one.
This was pretty fun to build, and also offered some optimistic takeaways.
The good news? We quickly realized that there are a number of companies who are already killing it in this sphere, pumping out millions of payments often within 30 days of a usage, license, or other triggering event. The reason is that music accounts payable (or AP) is now a manageable art, and no longer a hindrance to a company’s success in this space.
The available tools and infrastructure are advanced and can be implemented swiftly and efficiently. That was our biggest and most hopeful lesson learned while creating this playbook.
Tipalti also observed that the music industry is rapidly establishing competitive benchmarks for payments. Indeed, AP industry standards are quickly becoming established.
These benchmarks include capturing, accounting for, and paying rights owners for every play on any platform, in any territory, within 30 days. Payment infrastructure must also accommodate various payment methods and automatically handle tax obligations across different regions (whether states, provinces, or countries).
Furthermore, seamless integration with existing cloud ERP software is crucial for managing large volumes of payees and clients without excessive manual labor.
Something else Tipalti taught us during this process: you should always be able to definitively answer the question, “Who are we paying, exactly?”
A key step is to figure out exactly who you need to pay, where and when you need to pay them — and of course, how much they should receive. Then you can evaluate your current accounting and payment infrastructure against industry standards.
Anyway: the playbook kicks off with a number of checklists to assess your AP stack, with solutions on how to fill the gaps.
We hope you’ll check out the playbook – and hope it helps!
