LONDON, UK. (Top40 Charts/ RoyaltyShare) - RoyaltyShare, a premier provider of digital royalty solutions to the entertainment industry, today announced the acquisition of Musicalc, a UK-based provider of royalty accounting software for the music industry. With the acquisition, RoyaltyShare expands its European presence, enhances its royalty applications to serve its growing worldwide roster of record label customers, and adds royalty processing software and services for music publishers.
The acquisition immediately extends RoyaltyShare's business to include a number of leading European record labels and music publishers, as well as providing key staff to form the basis of its European operations.
As was stated when the company recently announced its Series B funding, RoyaltyShare plans to extend its Web-based services to include support for music publishers and music publishing administrators. With over half of its customers being music publishers, Musicalc brings extensive expertise in this area to support the expanded publisher-specific applications of the RoyaltyShare platform.
"Over the past 25 years, Musicalc has established a long-standing reputation for providing excellent software and support to help record labels and music publishers manage the business-critical responsibilities of royalty accounting to recording artists and songwriters," said Bob Kohn, Chairman and CEO of RoyaltyShare. "Bringing the Musicalc team and its extensive customer base into the RoyaltyShare portfolio will be a key step in rolling out our expanded European operations and providing scalable, back-office IT infrastructure to music publishers and music publishing administrators."
Formed in 1982 to develop and market PC-based software for independent record labels and music publishing companies, Musicalc has over 100 customers throughout Europe and the U.S., including notable record companies such as the Beggars Group (U.K.), Skint/Loaded (U.K.), Cherry Red (U.K), K-Tel/Dominion Entertainment (U.S.), Heccon Group/Rap-a-lot Records (U.S.) and AMC (Belgium). Musicalc's publishing clients include Reverb Music (U.K.), Zumsteg & Partner (Switzerland), Minder Music (U.K.), Misty Music (Scandinavia), and 1630 Publishing (U.S.).
"As digital distribution becomes increasingly essential to the music industry, record labels and music publishers require new technologies optimized to support business in the digital era," said Chris Palmer, founder and managing director of Musicalc. "We are very pleased to offer our existing customers access to RoyaltyShare's web-based platform, and the variety of services which RoyaltyShare offers, such as encoding and delivery of content, meta-data management, digital revenue data aggregation and digital sales analytics. The combination provides our customers with a full solution for managing the complexity of the digital sales process."
Chris Palmer, previously managing director at Musicalc, and Asa Palmer, previously director of marketing, will both join RoyaltyShare and form the core of the company's European operation. Chris will be Director of Product Management for Europe. Asa will become RoyaltyShare's Director of Client Services for Europe and General Manager of Musicalc.
RoyaltyShare will maintain the current Musicalc offices in Surrey and looks to open a London-based office to house the combined operations. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
