Stem has announced the launch of Tone, a new brand and business under Stem Disintermedia ownership intended to create modern financial tools for the music industry. Tone, led by the company’s chief product officer Brendan Kao, “was created to fix the broken financial processes across the entire music industry, regardless of which label or distributor an artist utilizes, enabling them to take control of their finances,” according to the announcement.
Tone’s first financial services offering, Royalties, aims to makes royalty processing simple for modern record labels, ingesting all sales and cost data, calculating royalties and enabling one-click payments for an entire label roster. Labels can uncover actionable business insights via Tone’s dashboards as well as allowing artists to log in to their own portal to understand and manage their finances. Some of the earliest adopters of Tone are artist-run labels and imprints like A-Trak’s Fool’s Gold Records and 3LAU’s Blume Records.
The announcement states, “Artists receive statements that are mobile-friendly and easy to understand. And the dashboard shows all recipients—artists, songwriters, producers, and everyone else—how their work is performing across time and across platforms. Tone is setting a new standard for financial clarity and efficiency in the music business. By simplifying the royalty process and fostering stronger relationships between labels and artists, they’re making sure that everyone who works in music understands their worth.”
“As we look towards the future of our company, streamlined royalties will allow us to scale and free up one of the less enjoyable aspects of our jobs,” says Nathaniel Heller, a label manager at Fool’s Gold Records.