The Royalty Network is one of the country’s leading family-owned independent music publishing companies. The company represents legends including Asha Bhosle; singers who’ve gained notoriety through Bollywood films, such as Hariharan; and new independents driving the hip-hop / R&B movement, often led by its client Azadi Records. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Royalty Network founder and CEO Frank Liwall to learn more about the company.
Frank Liwall’s Background
What is Frank Liwall’s background? Liwall said:
“I started my career in Accounting, originally with a focus on being an Actuary and eventually segueing into Accounting. My initial experience, after finding public accounting a bit too mundane, was in royalty accounting. I originally focused on film and video, and eventually music, which is where I found my passion.”
Formation Of Royalty Network
How did the idea for the company come together? Liwall shared:
“After handling royalty audits in the music industry and seeing decades-old trends continue, I wanted to step out and offer a fresh approach for the industry. Throughout my years in royalty auditing, it became obvious that many of the most seriously underpaid and misrepresented songwriters were exploited due to their lack of education about the market. I wanted to step out and create a company that would offer the time necessary to educate songwriters about the different deals that were available to them, and offer an alternative that would allow them to build long-term income for themselves and their heirs.”
Core Services
What are the Royalty Network’s core services? Liwall explained:
“Today, our main services are what we term as full-service music publishing. We pride ourselves on protection of our clients’ works, worldwide collection of everything that’s due to them, and adding value through our creative services.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Liwall and the team faced in building the company? Liwall acknowledged:
“Throughout the three decades since I started the company, we’ve faced numerous challenges, including the transition from physical to digital, the transition from full albums to singles, the struggles with finding a fair market pricing for our works, and having to operate in a non-existent willing-buyer willing-seller marketplace. The latest challenges involve the influx of capital from venture-capital and private-equity-backed entities, many of which don’t have the same long-term approach we have to development and accountability to our songwriters.”
Evolution Of Royalty Network’s Technology
How has the company evolved since launching? Liwall noted:
“Our initial focus was to offer a music publishing administration service that would allow songwriters to maintain their ownership while having our team handle the administrative burden. This included registering the works on a worldwide basis, handlining all the licensing, and tracking all the royalties due. Today, we offer a full-service approach to music publishing. This includes everything we started with initially and has expanded to include co-publishing, full publishing, catalog sales, joint venture opportunities, data tracking, and more.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Liwall cited:
“The Royalty Network recently celebrated our thirty-year anniversary. Over the course of the past decades, we pride ourselves as being a fully independent and self-financed company that offers a personal touch and has the same worldwide reach as any multinational major publisher.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Liwall about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“It’s been an honor for us to be involved in handling the catalogs of some of the greatest songwriters of all time. These include Otis Redding, Burt Bacharach, Bill Withers, and others. Along the way we’ve represented #1 hits by contemporary artists such as Ed Sheeran, Ariana Grande, Shaggy, TLC, Drake, and more.”
Funding
When asking Liwall about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“We are a self-funded company that maintains solid, flexible funding relationships with our banking partners. No deal is unattainable as we maintain flexible joint venture opportunities with some of our like-minded partners, which opens up the ability to close deals of any size.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Liwall affirmed:
“The full-service personal touch with clear transparency and accountability – without having to be held accountable to outside investors or a board – is clearly our differentiating factors. We’re able to pivot and tailor deals to meet the needs of each individual client and are not stuck in a cookie-cutter approach that offers no flexibility.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Liwall concluded:
“In the years ahead, we’re focused on building out our analytics tools. The use of AI, for instance, is allowing us to shift our analytical capabilities from months to weeks to days. The closer we can get to that, the more immediate our response will be to capturing variances that currently exist in the market due to the volume of bad data that continues to infiltrate our industry. Our goal is one hundred percent efficiency in spotting these variances, and with a flexible and integrated approach, I’m confident we can get there.”
