Music Labels Editing and Proofreading Services

An artist opens a royalty statement, sees a negative balance, and concludes they are being cheated. They are usually not. What has happened is that a recording advance, a video contribution and half a tour subsidy are sitting in a column they were never taught to read, being recouped at a rate nobody explained — and the label has just spent a relationship it will not get back.

We edit what record labels and music companies produce — royalty statements and their explanatory material, recording and distribution agreements, artist-facing summaries of contract terms, licensing and sync documentation, release plans and marketing commitments, distribution and metadata documentation, and the correspondence that manages artist relationships. Our editors work on documents that explain money to people who did not sign up to read accounts.

The royalty statement and the note beside it is where a label's relationship with an artist is either maintained or destroyed, and its failure is a spreadsheet issued without a translation. An artist who cannot follow their own statement will assume the worst, and they will be right often enough for the assumption to persist. We work through these so income is shown by source with the underlying quantity — streams, downloads, physical, sync, performance — since a single figure prevents an artist from checking anything against what they know about their own activity; so the artist's rate is stated with what it is applied to, because a percentage of net receipts and a percentage of retail price are wholly different numbers and the difference is where trust is lost; so the recoupable balance is presented as an opening balance, additions with their dates and descriptions, recoupment applied this period and a closing balance, given that an artist needs to see the shape of the debt rather than its size; so what is recoupable is distinguished from what is recouped at a different rate, as video and tour support frequently recoup differently and almost no artist knows this; so deductions and reserves are itemised with the reserve's release schedule; so the reporting period, the payment date and the lag between them are stated; and so a short plain note explains, once per statement, what recoupment means. Statements written this way keep artists for a second album.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including agreements, statements, artist information and commercial terms. We are editors rather than accountants, royalty specialists or lawyers, and we offer no view on rates, accounting or any agreement. What we can do is make the statement explicable to the person it concerns.