Sony/ATV adds ‘virtual ATM’ to royalty portal

Just a matter of weeks after upgrading its royalty portal Score to offer songwriters instant, transparent data on their royalties, Sony/ATV Music Publishing is going the whole hog by incorporating a virtual ATM into the platform which, it promises, will allow uses to request advances “in less than a minute.”

Lyric Financial, the financial services/technology firm, provides the vATM technology through a new partnership which Sony/ATV’s U.S. writers and publishing clients can tap into. It’s unclear when the music publishing giant’s “new and improved” royalty application will be available to users in Australia and New Zealand.

Two years in the making, the vATM is a “simple, easy to use application that provides songwriters with a clear view of their available earnings and allows them to request advances in less than a minute,” explains Lyric Financial founder and Chief Executive Eli Ball in a statement. “These basic tools will be invaluable to any music industry creative or company in budgeting and managing the ups and downs of their cash flow.”

Ball and his team created the software to enable rights holders to check and withdraw current and projected royalties almost instantly, and doesn’t take rights from the songwriter, according to a release. Instead, the company charges a one-off service fee.

Earlier this year, Sony/ATV rolled out a bunch of new, instant-access Score features including its so-called “Scorecard” graphic interface which collates royalty info for both current and historic periods. The revamped platform is available for desktop devices at this stage, though the market-leading pub giant has pledged to release a Score app in the “near future.”

Sony/ATV isn’t the only player leaping into this space for providing transparent, 24/7 access to earnings.  Independent music services company Kobalt recently unveiled AWAL, a mobile app which promises to “de-mystify” streaming data for its 20,000-odd independent artist and label partners. AWAL gathers data from Spotify and Apple Music and allow users to track sources of streaming, to get insights into who is listening to what, and where.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.