Glossary

Glossary


Account

An environment that users have access to. An Account can be either a parent account or client account.


Parent account

An account for the purpose of administering distribution and royalties for assets owned by client accounts.

  • Owns payees and contracts
  • Responsible for inspecting releases for fraud and/or bad incompliant metadata.
  • Responsible for processing royalties for its payees

Client account

An account for the purpose of distributing releases.

  • Owns assets, artists, and labels

User

Person with authentication credentials that are associated with a set of permissions in one or more accounts.


Parent account user

A user with access to a parent account. User could be created upon onboarding or invited as a team member or payee portal.


Client user

A user with access to a client account. User could be created upon signup or invited as a team member, artist portal or label portal.


Owner

Original user that created the account or team member given the status of owner.


Team member

Invited user that has access to all content in an account.

  • A team member of a child account has access to all assets in the account.
  • A team member of a parent account has access to all contracts and payess in the parent account.

Portal

A user with content-specific permissions limited to that which is relevant to a specific artist, label or payee. Note that content-specific permissions are not related to permissions to view specific components of the account (such as catalog management vs distribution) or to perform actions. These types of permissions can be set an any type of user.


Payee portal

A parent account user with access limited to what is relevant to a single reporting-only payee.


Artist portal

A client account user with access limited to what is relevant to a single artist.


Label portal

A client account user with access limited to what is relevant to a single label.


Invited users

A new or existing user that is invited to have access to an account by an existing user. This is opposed to a user that signs up.


Sign up

A process where a new or existing user creates a new client account.


Permissions

Abilities granted to users for viewing content or performing actions in an account. This includes content-specific permissions (such as those granted to portal users) and action specific permissions (catalog management, distribtuion, etc.).

For example, an artist portal is a user that has permission to view only a subset of assets owned by a client account. The artist portal may or may not have permission to create new releases.


Catalog

A collection of assets owned by a client account.


Content

A generic term for assets, contracts, artists, payees, and other entities owned by an account.


Assets

Assets are abstract entities referring to intellectual property and defined by the combination of metadata and a media file. There are various types of assets:

  • Audio assets: releases and tracks
  • Videos
  • NFTs

Release

One or more tracks distributed as a unit, with all its corresponding metadata.


Track

A sound recording that can be associated with one or more releases, and all its corresponding metadata.


Single

Usually a release with one track. However, technically it can contain up to 4 tracks depending on their length.


Compilation

A release where tracks are performed by different main primary artists. The release level artist is null.


Label

Metadata entity that describes a label for a release.


Artist

Metadata entity that describes a performer of a release or track.


Main primary artist

Main artist indicated with the artistId parameter on a release or track.


Contributor artist

Artists in addition to the main primary artist on a release or track. Note that additional primary artists can be added as contributors with the “primary” role.


Contract

Logic for how to payout royalties accrued for a set of assets to a set of payees.


Account level contract

Contract that governs all assets owned by a client account.


Label level contract

Contract that governs all assets for a specific label owned by a specific client account.


Artist level contract

Contract that governs all assets for a specific artist owned by a specific client account.


Release level contract

Contract that governs explicitly indicated releases.


Track level contract

A contract that governs explicitly indicated tracks. Note that a track level contract will never govern release- level revenue, for example when the whole release is downloaded.


Payee

An entity that receives revenue. A payee can be either a client payee or a reporting-only payee.


Client payee

A payee associated with a client account.

  • When a new client account is created (upon signup) it is created with an account level contract that covers all assets in the account and pays all revenue to the client payee.
  • All information relevant to a client payee is available in the client account.

Reporting-only payee

A payee added to a contract that is not directly associated with a client account.

  • Can be invited as a user, creating a payee portal.

Revenue analytics

Monthly analytics based on statement data.


Daily analytics for how assets are consumed.