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Indie Rights Agency Merlin Extends OTTO Partnership

Music Press Asia: How can technology help us increase the chance of cashing in from licensing music? Merlin and OTTOMATE Ltd seem to have deviced a solution for that.

Music Press Asia: How can technology help us increase the chance of cashing in from licensing music? Merlin and OTTOMATE Ltd seem to have deviced a solution for that.

Merlin, the global digital rights agency for the independent label sector, has extended its partnership for another three years with OTTO — a bespoke dashboard that helps independent labels and distributors track and manage sales reports and streaming activity online.

Servicing a global membership of independent labels and distributors, the analytics and reporting application, launched in 2014, was specifically used to track and manage deal information, royalty reporting, market analysis and financial statements.

For the past seven years, OTTO has been offering both front end services and an API-powered solution. Gradually building a reporting and data infrastructure since 2013 in a highly developed digital setting to support aggregators and labels.

A simple reporting and analytics interface has also been built for distributed labels.

Today, Merlin’s members command in excess of 12% of the digital recorded music market and embody more than 20,000 independent record labels and distributors from 63 countries.

“We’re excited to announce the renewal of our partnership with OTTO. As the digital music market evolves, we look forward to our continued collaboration and the opportunity to drive innovation for Merlin members and our partners around the world.”
— Chaida Kapfunde, Head of Technology & Development, Merlin

“Having worked with and seen an organisation such as Merlin grow in the past 5 years has been a great challenge and of course an honour to be backing our independent community with simplified processes,” said Eric Namour, founder and CEO of Ottomate Ltd.

Recently, Merlin announced that $130 million was generated from settlements and other non-royalty income alongside a $845 million, a record-breaking year-on-year payments, to its members for the period April 2018 to March 2019.
 
Today, Merlin has paid out more than $2 billion to members since opening for business in May 2008, and currently licenses over 25 DSPs globally including Facebook, YouTube Music, Spotify, Deezer, Pandora, Alibaba, NetEase and Tencent.

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