Deadwax Book a run through
DW-014 Side A · A1 Royalty administration · London

Matching is
the whole job.

A stream reports as an ISRC. A songwriter is paid against an ISWC. Nothing anywhere in the supply chain guarantees that the two are linked, which is why hundreds of millions of pounds sit in black box accounts every year waiting for somebody to prove who wrote what. Deadwax ingests thirty eight statement formats, matches recording to work to payee, and closes your quarter in six days.

Book a run through Follow a pound

Track listing

  1. A1 Matching is the whole job
  2. A2 Thirty eight formats, one ledger
  3. A3 Where a pound of streaming goes
  4. A4 Advances and recoupment
  5. B1 Everyone you already send files to
  6. B2 The API
  7. B3 Money movement and controls
  8. B4 Pricing and release notes
  9. B5 Who made this
A2 Thirty eight formats, one ledger

The identifiers do not talk to each other, and never have.

An ISRC identifies a recording. An ISWC identifies the underlying composition. There is no registry that authoritatively links them, so every royalty system in the world is guessing, and most of them guess badly.

A DSP reports streams against an ISRC because that is what it played. A collecting society pays a writer against an ISWC because that is what the writer registered. In between sit release metadata, alternate versions, live takes, remixes with different ISRCs and the same ISWC, covers with the same ISWC and different everything else, plus the twelve territories where the society has the work registered under a slightly different title.

Deadwax runs a three stage match. Exact identifier first. Then a normalised fingerprint built from title, contributor names, duration and release date, scored against a corpus of 94 million works. Then a human queue, because the last two per cent is genuinely ambiguous and pretending otherwise is how labels end up paying the wrong person.

Run a line through it

One statement line, the way a service actually sends one. Break the identifier, change the title, move the runtime, and watch which of the three stages has to catch it.

Identifier
Title as reported
Performer string
Territory

The line as it arrives

Match confidence
0confidence

Work reached

T-923.451.007-4

Matched, pays this cycle

Why, rule by rule

    Line value
    £0.00
    Payable this cycle
    £0.00
    Held
    £0.00
    • 99.4%ISRC matched on first pass, no human touch
    • 97.1%Recording linked to a registered work
    • 4.2 hMedian time to clear a review queue item
    • 1.24 bnTransaction lines processed in FY26
    • 6 daysMedian quarter close, against 45 across the industry
    • 94 mWorks in the matching corpus

    The identifiers we carry on every line

    • ISRCGB-XYZ-25-00147Recording. Country, registrant, year, designation.
    • ISWCT-923.451.007-4Composition. Assigned by the society, not the label.
    • UPC / EAN5060941580479Product. What the distributor delivered.
    • GRidA1-2425G-ABC1234002-MRelease, for DDEX delivery and reconciliation.
    • IPI / CAE00521844716Interested party. The writer or publisher themselves.
    • DPIDPADPIDA2019041801UDDEX party. Who sent the file.
    A3 Where a pound of streaming actually goes

    Follow one pound of subscription money all the way to the person who made the record.

    Every figure below is a real deduction with a real name. Change the territory, the service and the deal, and watch the number at the bottom move. This is the same waterfall engine that runs your statements, with one line of input instead of a hundred million.

    Territory
    Service
    Recording deal
    Advance position
    The pound drawn as a record A disc divided into wedges, one for each party that takes a share of a pound of subscriber spend. The artist wedge is highlighted. The wedge sizes update with the controls.
    One pound, cut the way a record is cut. The wedge in acid is what reaches the artist.
    1. Subscriber pays1.000
    2. Value added tax at 20%0.833
    3. Spotify retains 30%0.583
    4. Recording rights share, 76%0.443
    5. Less label services share, 30%0.310
    6. Publishing share, 24%0.140
    7. Less society commission, 12%0.123
    Artist receives £0.310 31.0p of every pound
    • Writer receives£0.123
    • Label£0.133
    • Society commission£0.017
    • Spotify£0.250
    • HMRC£0.167

    Publishing is shown for a self published writer who is a PRS for Music and MCPS member. A co-publishing deal moves 25% of the writer share to the publisher. Recording and publishing shares are the headline splits used across the major services and vary by contract. Values are rounded to the tenth of a penny.

    A4 Advances, recoupment, and the parts nobody automates

    Recoupment is where royalty software usually gives up and hands you a spreadsheet.

    An advance is not a single number. It is a balance with an interest free clock, a set of recoupable cost buckets, a definition of what is recoupable against what, and a cross-collateralisation clause that may or may not reach the next album. Get it wrong in the artist's favour and you overpay. Get it wrong the other way and you get an audit.

    Deadwax models the contract, not the average of contracts. Every clause below is a field you can set per deal, per project, per territory, with an effective date so a renegotiation in March does not retroactively rewrite January.

    Recoupable buckets

    • Cash advance, per project or per term
    • Recording costs with a per-line approval trail
    • Video and marketing, often at 50% recoupable
    • Tour support, usually 100% recoupable and 0% returnable
    • Independent radio and PR, capped

    Contract mechanics

    • Cross-collateralisation across a named project group
    • Escalators by unit or by term, with a mid-period trigger
    • Reduced rates for budget, compilation and digital-only
    • Controlled composition clauses on US mechanicals
    • Sunset clauses on a departing distributor

    Things we refuse to guess

    • Reserves against physical returns, you set the rate and the liquidation schedule
    • Unmatched income, held in a named suspense account, never swept to the label
    • Disputed splits, frozen at line level until the parties sign
    • Estate and successor claims, routed to legal review
    • Anything a contract does not actually say

    The three year rule. Under most society and DSP claim windows you have three years to make a retroactive claim on unmatched income, and it is measured from the reporting period rather than from the day you noticed. Deadwax runs an expiry report every month showing exactly how much of your unmatched pool falls out of claimable range in the next ninety days. Labels using it recovered a median of £41,200 in the first year.

    B1 Everyone you already send files to

    Thirty eight inbound formats, sixty one outbound registrations, one reconciliation.

    Services, inbound

    • Spotify
    • Apple Music
    • Amazon Music
    • YouTube Music
    • YouTube Content ID
    • Deezer
    • TIDAL
    • TikTok
    • Anghami
    • Boomplay
    • NetEase Cloud
    • JioSaavn
    • Audiomack
    • KKBOX
    • Beatport
    • Bandcamp

    Societies and collectors

    • PRS for Music
    • MCPS
    • PPL
    • The MLC
    • SoundExchange
    • ASCAP
    • BMI
    • GEMA
    • SACEM
    • SIAE
    • STIM
    • KODA
    • BUMA STEMRA
    • SOCAN
    • APRA AMCOS
    • Merlin

    Standards we speak

    • DDEX DSR 4.1
    • DDEX DSR 4.2
    • DDEX ERN 4.3
    • DDEX MWN
    • CWR 2.2
    • CWR 3.1
    • CISAC CIS-Net
    • ISO 3901 ISRC
    • ISO 15707 ISWC
    • ISO 27729 ISNI

    Systems, two way

    • Xero
    • NetSuite
    • QuickBooks
    • Sage
    • Revelator
    • Believe
    • FUGA
    • The Orchard
    • Wise Platform
    • Modulr

    If a format is not on this list, send us a sample file. Median time to production for a new statement schema is nine working days, and the mapping is version controlled so a format change in October does not silently corrupt your January comparatives.

    B2 The API

    Every number on a statement is addressable, down to the line that produced it.

    If an artist manager asks why the Germany number moved, you should be able to answer in one request rather than by opening four spreadsheets. Every royalty line carries its source file, its ingest batch, its match confidence and the exact contract version that priced it.

    Endpoints

    • POST/v1/statements/ingestUpload a source file, returns a batch
    • GET/v1/royalty-linesFilter by ISRC, period, territory, service
    • GET/v1/payees/{id}/balanceEarned, recouped, reserved, payable
    • GET/v1/works/{iswc}/linksEvery recording linked, with confidence
    • POST/v1/matches/{id}/resolveClear a review queue item
    • GET/v1/unmatched/expiringClaimable income by expiry date
    • POST/v1/payouts/runsCreate a payout run, dry run supported

    Webhooks

    • batch.ingested
    • batch.failed
    • match.needs_review
    • statement.published
    • payout.settled
    • advance.recouped
    Rate limit
    1,200 req/min, 100 MB per upload
    Idempotency
    Idempotency-Key on every write
    Auth
    OAuth 2.0, scoped per label entity
    Versioning
    URL major, 24 month support window
    Requestcurl
    curl -G https://api.deadwax.co/v1/royalty-lines \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DW_TOKEN" \
  -d "isrc=GB-XYZ-25-00147" \
  -d "period=2026-Q2" \
  -d "territory=DE"
    B3 Money movement and who is allowed to touch it

    We calculate the money. A regulated institution holds it. Those are two different companies on purpose.

    Deadwax is not a payment institution and does not want to be one. Client funds sit in segregated safeguarding accounts at an FCA authorised electronic money institution. We instruct payments. We never hold them.

    Payout rails, controls and compliance in full3

    Payouts

    • Faster Payments in the UK, SEPA Instant across the euro area, ACH and wire in the US
    • Local rails in 34 further countries through the regulated partner
    • 21 payout currencies, foreign exchange at interbank plus 0.35%
    • Configurable minimum threshold, default 15 pounds, with balances rolled not written off
    • Payee onboarding with W-8BEN and W-9 collection and US withholding applied at source

    Controls

    • Dual approval on any payout run above a threshold you set
    • Immutable audit log on every calculation, retained ten years
    • Role based access down to a single artist roster
    • Dry run on every payout, showing the exact file before it is sent
    • Suspense accounts for unmatched income, reportable and never swept

    Compliance

    • SOC 2 Type II, report period 1 Apr 2025 to 31 Mar 2026, available under NDA
    • ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified, scope covers platform and corporate
    • UK GDPR and EU GDPR, Data Protection Act 2018, ICO registration ZB612044
    • Residency in eu-west-2 London by default, eu-central-1 Frankfurt on request
    • No card data anywhere in the platform, so no PCI DSS scope
    • Annual penetration test by a CREST accredited firm, most recent February 2026
    B4 Pricing

    One rate. A floor, a ceiling, and no charge for anything that should be free.

    0.9% of distributed revenue
    • Monthly minimum£240
    • Monthly cap£4,800
    • Set up£0
    • Per payee, per statement, per API call£0
    What the rate works out at across four label sizes
    Annual distributed revenue Charge Effective rate What binds
    £200,000£2,8801.44%Monthly minimum
    £320,000£2,8800.90%Minimum and rate meet exactly here
    £2,400,000£21,6000.90%The rate
    £8,000,000£57,6000.72%Monthly cap

    Distributed revenue means money we actually calculate and pay out on your behalf. Income held in suspense because it is unmatched is not charged for, because charging you for money nobody can identify would be a strange thing to do. Everything is billed monthly in arrears with a twelve month term and ninety days notice.

    Release notes

    1. 4.14.0

      Historical unmatched claim tooling

      Build and submit bulk claims against the MLC historical unmatched royalties pool directly from the review queue, with the supporting evidence bundle generated per work.

    2. 4.13.0

      DDEX DSR 4.2 ingest

      Full support for the 4.2 sales and usage message, including the new subscriber and usage type breakdowns. Files remain accepted in 4.1 and are upconverted on ingest.

    3. 4.12.0

      SEPA Instant payouts

      Euro area payouts now settle in under ten seconds rather than the next working day. Runs above the dual approval threshold still queue for the second signature.

    4. 4.11.0

      CWR 3.1 registration export

      Generate works registrations in CWR 3.1 for societies that have moved off 2.2, with per society profile handling for territory and share formats.

    5. 4.10.0

      Cross-collateralisation across project groups

      Define a named group of projects that recoup against a shared advance balance, with an effective date so a renegotiation does not rewrite closed periods.

    B5 Who made this

    Nineteen people. Four of us have been on the receiving end of a royalty audit.

    • Nkechi BalogunCo-founder, chief executive

      Ran royalties for an independent label group with 4,000 releases and a catalogue going back to 1978. Chartered accountant before that, which is why the ledger is double entry.

    • Rory Mac AodhaCo-founder, chief technology officer

      Built payments infrastructure at a cross border money transfer business. Wrote the immutable ledger that every royalty line lands in.

    • Sofia Reyes-LundHead of rights

      Twelve years in publishing administration across London and Stockholm. Sat on a DDEX working group and still reads the specification for pleasure.

    • Dan OkonkwoHead of label partnerships

      A&R, then distribution, then five years explaining to artists why their statement said what it said. Runs onboarding.

    Founded 2023 in London. Backed by a 9 million pound Series A led by a music technology fund, closed February 2026. We work with 61 labels across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Germany, together representing about 34,000 recordings.

    Next

    Send us one quarter of statements. We will show you what you are missing.

    Not a demo environment. Your files, your catalogue, your contracts, matched and priced inside five working days, with the unmatched pool broken out by expiry date. If the number is zero we will tell you that too, and you will have learned something for free.

    [email protected]

    Deadwax, Unit 4, Bache’s Street, London N1 6DL