Synchtank and peermusic make IRIS available to the music royalty sector

By Emmanuel Legrand

Synchtank, a London-based cloud-powered software platform, has teamed with music publisher peermusic to unveil its latest software, IRIS (International Repertoire Information System), a royalty accounting platform for collecting, distributing, and/or reporting on music royalties.

  The product is aimed at rights owners, rights holders and rights administrators, with the ambition to "maximising automation and bringing clarity to increasingly complex processes." The system was originally developed by peermusic and has been running globally for over 10 years. It is already fully integrated with over 60 Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) and has over 1,000 formats for statements.

  “We built IRIS to allow us to best serve our clients in the digital era,” said peermusic Deputy CEO Mary Megan Peer. “For us this meant having a secure system with the ability to deal with significant amounts of data and with regularly changing CMO statement formats, but with quick processing time. IRIS has allowed our global royalties departments to become more efficient, allowing them more time to spend on income tracking. Our songwriters and their representatives appreciate the transparency, detailed information and ability to drill down into specific song details.”

Gap in the market

  According to the two companies, IRIS "can transform tedious, time-sucking tasks that can take days into the work of mere hours, increasing efficiencies and reducing costs" and allow organisations to "devote more time to value-add tasks than reports and repetitive data inputting."

  Synchtank’s Chief Business Officer Chris Cass, said. “We realised there was a gap in the market for high-performance royalty systems in this increasingly data-driven and complex environment. We discovered that peermusic had developed a system for their 30 worldwide offices based on these principals, and we worked directly with them to perfect the IRIS platform. It’s already handled more than $1 billion revenues and incorporates peermusic’s experience in markets around the world and our tech know-how.”

  “IRIS dramatically increases processing speed without missing any deadline or causing any distribution errors," said Cass.