Music rights administration
For independent artists, songwriters, publishers, labels and administrators who have outgrown the spreadsheet. One workflow from catalog to statement: works, recordings, releases and their editions, tracks, videos, agreements and the people behind them, all validated in one place — every royalty line matched to what earned it, and registration files societies actually ingest.
Matching
A statement arrives with 40,000 rows and no ISWC on most of them. ASTRO walks a six-step chain and scores its own confidence at each step, so you can see why a line matched — not just that it did. What the chain cannot resolve goes to a review queue rather than a guess.
Rights administration is a business where a wrong number is indistinguishable from a right one until somebody is paid the wrong amount. These are the rules that make the difference visible.
Validated
Every identifier passes real check-digit mathematics before it is stored, and the corrected canonical form is what gets saved. 501 of 501 ISWCs, 114 of 114 barcodes and 553 of 554 IPIs in this catalog pass — the one failure is a genuinely wrong number, left in place and flagged rather than quietly corrected.
Honest
Nothing claims to work until it is proven by real use. Imports and automated suggestions always pass a human review before anything is created. Money is stored at full precision and rounded only on screen.
Accountable
Every edit and every share change is recorded automatically, with the person, job or script that made it named on the record. It is the evidence in a money dispute, which is the only reason it exists.
End to end
Six steps, and the mechanism that does the work is named at every one — because the difference between rights systems is never the diagram, it is what happens when the data is imperfect.
A statement lands
Drop the file in. ASTRO recognises the sender from the file itself rather than asking you, reads the columns it actually has, and fingerprints the contents so the same statement uploaded twice can never be counted twice.
→ 11 formats · accounting negatives — (1.23) and 1.23- — parsed, not dropped
Every line finds its work
Most rows arrive with no ISWC. ASTRO walks a six-step chain — society ID, ISWC, title, alternate title, writer names — and scores its confidence at each step, so you see why a line matched. What the chain cannot resolve waits in a queue.
→ a title match alone is never enough — version and identity must agree
The split that was in force divides it
The share in force on the day the money was earned is the share that splits it. Adding a co-writer next year does not silently re-cut last year’s statements.
→ as-of dating on both the rows and the denominator
Deal terms decide what is payable
No covering agreement means not payable, and that fails closed. A missing rate is a missing term, never a helpful 0% — because assuming zero is the most expensive reading of a contract nobody wrote down.
→ territory, term, post-term collection and withholding, all dated
Registration files that survive the society
CWR is fixed-width: one byte out of place and the society rejects the file. ASTRO builds 2.1, 2.1r7 and 2.2 against the published offsets, and refuses to send a file that names one company beside another company’s number.
→ blocks, never warns — a warning inside a file is read after it is sent
Statements people can check
Every figure traces back to the statement line it came from. Amounts are stored at full precision and rounded only where they are printed, so a total always reconciles to the rows that made it.
→ a locked period refuses a late write at the database, not in a form
Eleven vendor formats with automatic detection and re-upload protection. Mangled encodings are recognised and decoded before any comparison, so “Eres T√∫” finds “Eres Tú”.
Analysed by territory, artist, work, recording, release, label, platform and partner — with recording-side and publishing-side money always kept apart, because they are owed to different people under different agreements.
ERN 3.8.2 and ERN 4.3 both return zero schema errors and zero business-rule errors from DDEX’s own hosted validator, on a real 39-track release.
Suggestions proposed on the record itself, drawn from the nine services that genuinely store data: Spotify, Apple Music, MusicBrainz, Deezer, Tidal, Discogs, Genius, LRCLIB and The MLC. Every one is a proposal a human accepts, never an unattended write.
A work lives in exactly one catalog, and everyone with a genuine relationship to it can be granted their own view. Separate publishers are walled off completely — enforced by the database itself, not only by the screens.
Coverage
A recording earns from distributors. A work earns from societies. They are different identifiers, different files and different counterparties, and a tool that only reads one of them leaves you reconciling the other by hand.
Masters, releases and distributor income
The side most royalty tools cover. ASTRO reads distributor and DSP statements, attributes them to recordings, and settles what is owed to artists and labels.
Works, societies and collection
The side that is usually somebody’s roadmap. It is where ASTRO started, because it is where the identifiers, the splits and the registrations live — and where a wrong number costs the most to unwind.
Earnings and accounting
Income is analysed eight ways, and recording-side money never mixes with publishing-side money — they are owed to different people under different agreements.
Periods that actually close
Open, closed, locked. Closing photographs the period; a locked one refuses a late write at the database itself, not in a form somebody can bypass. Reopening takes a written reason and keeps the snapshot.
Balances, advances and recoupment
Advances recoup FIFO against the balance already reduced by withholding, capped at the advance outstanding and at payout gross. A run can be repeated without paying anything twice.
Remittances that reconcile
Every client remittance carries a line-level ledger, and a ledger that does not sum to the total it explains is discarded rather than kept. One module computes the figure everywhere it is shown or written.
Money that is not yours yet
Income with no covering agreement is held, not quietly paid out. Payability fails closed, because an unpaid royalty is a conversation and an overpaid one is a clawback.
Statements people can check
Every figure traces to the statement line it came from. Full precision in storage, rounded only where it is printed, so a total always reconciles to its rows.
Withholding and fees, never invented
A missing rate is a missing term, not a helpful 0% — the system says so rather than guessing the most expensive reading of a contract nobody wrote down.
Pricing
Administrators and collection services take a percentage of what you earn, for as long as you earn it. ASTRO charges a subscription and takes nothing from the money societies pay you — it never passes through us.
Priced on catalog size, never per seat. Your team and your clients get as many logins as they need on every plan — charging per person is how a company ends up sharing one password, and a shared login destroys the audit trail that makes any of this worth having.
Put a real song in and see whether the thing holds up.
Start freeOne writer or a small catalog, doing it properly from the first song.
Start freeA catalog that registers with societies and needs the files to be right.
Start freeA working catalog that collects, reports and pays other people.
Start freeMany catalogs under one roof, each walled off from the others.
Talk to usASTRO is in private pilot and these prices are not final — nothing is charged today and signing up costs nothing. Pricing is locked at general availability, and anyone who joined before then keeps the rate they started on.
Questions
Do you take a percentage of my royalties?
No. Money from societies and distributors goes to you and never passes through ASTRO. You pay a subscription and keep everything you collect.
Is this instead of my administrator, or alongside?
Either. ASTRO is the system of record for the catalog — the identifiers, the splits, the agreements and the registration files. Plenty of catalogs run it alongside an administrator and use it to check the statements they receive.
I already have spreadsheets that work. Why change?
A spreadsheet cannot tell you that a share sums to 200% across two rows, that an ISWC has a wrong check digit, or that a statement was imported twice. ASTRO refuses those at the point of entry, which is the only point they are cheap to fix.
Can it read my statement format?
It reads eleven today and detects which one it has from the file. If yours is not among them, send a sample — a new format is a mapping, not a rebuild.
What happens to my data if I leave?
You export it. The catalog, the statements and the generated files are yours, in formats built to standards rather than to ours.
How much of this is actually finished?
The catalog, identifier validation, statement import, matching, earnings and CWR generation run on a real catalog daily. Delivery transport, media processing and outside-facing access are written but have not yet been through real use by anyone but us — so they are not sold here, and the section below names them rather than leaving you to find out.
ASTRO is in private pilot, running a real catalog with real money moving through it. The catalog, identifier validation, statement import, matching, earnings and CWR generation are proven daily. In active build: the delivery rail — secure transfer to each society, using credentials ASTRO already stores encrypted — and the reader for the CRD statement files societies return. We would rather tell you that than discover it together.
If you administer a catalog and the honest description above sounds like the tool you have been trying to assemble out of spreadsheets, make an account and put a song in it.