New Aussie company Hanshaw offers royalty processing & analytics insights for music biz

Pictured: Andy Turner 

Former major record label executive Andy Turner has launched a company which covers the whole royalties process – start-to-finish – including finding ways to identify missed income. 

Since the mid-1990s, Turner’s career has revolved around royalties, which means he’s been able to observe the industry’s evolution, what it does well and how it could be better. 

After a stint at the Performing Right Society (PRS) in London, where he served in a number of roles, Turner moved to Sydney in 2006. In Australia, he has been royalty manager at Sony Music for Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore, as well as royalty controller at Universal Music.

At close quarters Turner could observe how much of the majors’ royalty process was becoming centralised, and their deals were becoming more transparent, artist-friendly and flexible.

This gave the artists more bargaining power, allowing them to pick up distribution and licensing deals.

Artists don’t necessarily need the expensive recording facilities of a major label any more, Turner tells TMN. 

“They can record at home, and then take their recording and sell it to the highest bidder,” he says. 

The growing number of artists and labels using digital aggregators to bypass record labels also presents a growing need for royalty processing services.

While artists take more control of their careers, the administration side – including royalties – can be complex.

Turner saw a need to help artists and set up Hanshaw in April to not only provide these services, but to make the process easy.

“There was growth in that area and I wanted to help those artists who were new in the industry or found themselves with not many options, because there are virtually no other companies in Australia doing royalty processing. Turner explains.

“Essentially, clients provide us with their contracts, sales and metadata and we do the rest for them.”

These clients can range from an independent label with multiple artist commitments to a single artist with feature/producer/mixer obligations.

Hanshaw’s state-of-the-art software includes delivering statements to recipients through an online royalty portal with an interactive analytics dashboard.

“All the statements are branded and issued on behalf of the clients.”

The music industry increasingly sees the need to manage unstructured data as a problem for its business, and the need for greater accuracy to make more informed choices.

Hanshaw’s other service offering – insights from royalty data analytics sourced primarily from streaming services – is something that Turner says is a very exciting area and a personal passion.

Hanshaw’s data deep-dive can also find gaps and other anomalies in its clients’ reporting, and manages any of their auditing needs.

Delivering the most effective analytics requires a thorough understanding of each client, their journey to date, where they want to go with their next steps, and what defines success to them.

“It depends on the data we’re given, of course. But for example, we can use geographical data as a way of monitoring how advertising or a tour is influencing user traffic.

“We can investigate how the consumer interacts with the content and various aspects of the audience demographic.”

Hanshaw can also assist with music publishing/mechanicals, tour accounting, print publishing and film royalties.