Music innovation is a pretty consistent topic. Especially today, when it comes to artist & label services which directly concern you, our users. But working on an innovative solution for music isn’t always the easiest thing to do. Generally speaking, understanding the music industry is one of the biggest challenges for technology experts, potentially causing difficulties to understand the real challenges of the targeted users.
Moreover, the music industry being this complex on rights management, data standards and other fun things, makes external solutions pretty inaccurate for professionals of our field. The willingness to fully redefine the music business is not a viable plan; when we hear this kind of statement within music startups, it’s often coming from fundamental misinterpretation of how the music business operates. This causes a well-known lack of trust between innovation and music. A problem we, at Reprtoir, have faced building a music SaaS and we’re here to reassure you!
Innovation in music: is Reprtoir a musictech solution?
Reprtoir is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, designed for music professionals. Its goal is to give record labels and music publishing companies all the required tools to better manage their business and optimize their administrative management. We have built an innovative solution for the music industry players. In that sense, we are a musictech service.
More precisely, we are a music SaaS technology. We have started to work on one precise pain point we identified in work methods among music professionals. How? Well, because we are part of this community; Reprtoir was first our own internal tool to manage our assets as a licensing company, Rendez-Vous Digital.
Reprtoir is at the crossroads of music expertise and technology robustness. We have mixed these two important knowledge bases to create the most accurate solution for the music industry. We are answering one general need: optimizing data and administrative management for record labels and music publishers.
Music innovation is about music
I know; when we say it like that it seems obvious. But trust us when we say that it can be left out in the music innovation field. The fact is that more often than not, music startups are announcing themselves as the working methods’ disruption of an already complex business. But even if the system is not ideal, it is working based on practices and standards that have been defined and bent for years now.
Which doesn’t mean that we should leave it at that! Of course innovation and new ways of dealing with our core businesses are major challenges that we have to tackle. But the main thing to keep in mind is this: in musictech, we are working in the music industry, which should be the prime beneficiary of the work towards it. To do so, it implies to understand it in the first place, especially when a music startup is stepping in the industry for the first time.
Music SaaS: offering solutions to specific issues
The thing we could (and should) do is take things one step at a time. It would be completely out of place to think that we could solve each and every problem of our industry with only one magic technology. As we’ve witnessed several musictech solutions trying to work with record labels and music publishers on rights, catalogs or accounting, it is crucial that all aspects of the industry are being taken into account.
To give you a clear understanding of the situation, imagine the music industry as a big machine, with pistons moving everywhere. You don’t try to change the whole thing but to make some of the parts work better to improve it overall. The music industry is no linear process always working the same way, it keeps moving and evolving (especially now that its digital transition has been accelerated due to the pandemic).
So what now? Well, it’s time for music startups to take a moment to reflect on what would actually be helpful for music professionals and build strong and solid solutions. This is something we have been doing at Reprtoir for a few years now with our music SaaS. We built a software suite with several features to manage catalogs, music metadata, musical works, B2B playlists, music releases and royalty accounting for record labels and music publishers by using all these features ourselves first, then by staying very close to our customers to understand exactly which were the most pressing needs and improve Reprtoir accordingly.
But that’s not all, we are fully aware that music innovation gathers many (many!) solutions, and we’re working towards adding all compatible music services to Reprtoir. By integrating other service providers for the music industry we’re building a strong ecosystem, widening our scope of action and meeting more and more needs of our users.
Innovating in the music industry is a constant work in progress. We are proud to help music industry players work more efficiently, and it is only fair to listen to any of our (potential) users to create the most efficient service possible. So don’t hesitate to reach out to discover our full offer with the team and we’re always open to hear from you on any other topic!
