Deadmau5, whose catalog was snapped up by Create Music Group earlier this year for $55 million.
Music IP acquisitions and dealflow continued to hit record levels in 2025, with billions pouring into catalogs, asset-backed securities, or well-funded tranches earmarked for future catalog purchases. But big catalogs require complex financial systems to manage rights administration, collections, payouts, and, ultimately, growth. So how are newly minted mega-owners overseeing their tranches?
That’s a stressful question for anyone overseeing 8-, 9-, or sprawling 10-figure catalog valuations, particularly given the pressure to boost the underlying assets. Indeed, IP acquisition is only the first step – one quickly followed by potentially overwhelming blocking and tackling. That includes usage monitoring, collection across sprawling geographic markets, and oversight of a variety of rights types and payouts.
A typical catalog requires ingesting data from hundreds of platforms and sources spanning DSPs, sub-publishers, CMOs, and social media platforms, often in conflicting formats. And that’s just a working list of initial considerations to properly collect associated IP revenues, with downstream payouts and revenue splits another major area of concern.
“The explosion in music IP acquisitions has created a unique finance operations and mass payments challenge for the music industry,” said Rob Israch, President at Tipalti, an AI-powered finance operations platform that provides global mass payments. “Paying thousands of artists, producers, and rights holders around the world, accurately and on time, while managing all the different tax and compliance rules, can quickly become overwhelming and operationally heavy.”
According to executives at Tipalti, whose platform is tapped by a lengthy list of music distribution powerhouses and recently partnered with DMN, a critical component is ensuring that downstream rights owners and contributors are paid quickly and efficiently – even when millions of payouts are involved. That solves a big puzzle piece for rights owners, particularly those overseeing disparate catalog tranches and companies.
“The ability to reliably handle massive scale, compliance, and global payouts centrally enables efficient growth and ensures artists are compensated in a timely, positive way,” Israch continued.
Tipalti Mass Payments is quickly cornering the daunting arena of IP owner payouts – in an industry that takes ‘mass’ to extreme levels. The company isn’t exclusive to music, but its clientele now includes distribution heavyweights like DistroKid, ONErpm, Symphonic Distribution, and Gamma-owned Vydia, all of whom use Tipalti to manage vast, demanding mass-payout requirements.
The company has also brokered partnerships with IP-owning giants, including GoDigital Media Group and Create Music Group, as well as labels like Ninja Tune.
Tipalti explained that the key value-add for all of these companies is the ability to simplify royalty payout operations, involving a complex patchwork of rights owners, recipient payment methods, and tax considerations, all while establishing a centralized, ‘single source of truth’ for mass global payments to rights owners.
Grabbing even more focus is royalty collection itself, which typically demands corporate-grade operations or a serious team of specialized partners to manage.
‘Daunting’ is a mild way to describe this collection challenge, and as one IP-collection executive told DMN, ‘nobody collects everything’. And no wonder: more than 100 countries can be in play for superstar-level catalogs, with performance, sync, mechanical, and other rights licenses demanding separate collection efforts and accounting for each territory.
Jeff Price, a Tunecore cofounder who is currently heading Word Collections, told DMN that recognizing revenues in far-flung countries is one challenge. But extracting it often requires special relationships. “Without a partnership on the ground in certain countries, you simply can’t claim your royalties,” Price said.
Yet another issue involves mismatched content and missing metadata, a challenge that can rudely greet the newfound owner of a valuable catalog.
“The message is simple: don’t leave money on the table,” Aaron Kaufman, cofounder of Muso.AI, told DMN. “Every unmatched recording or unregistered song is a royalty waiting to be claimed.”
Muso.AI estimates that 83% of songwriters have an issue with MLC mismatches – and that may extend to a broader number of royalty databases. However, the company has recently released a matching tool that could dramatically lower that number.
Again, this is just scratching the surface of the ‘chores list’ confronting major IP owners – whether that’s a seasoned major label group or a newly-hatched IP-acquisition mega-tranche.
But after a record-setting IP acquisition explosion in 2025 – and serious investment spikes in recent years – the demands on royalty payouts and infrastructure capabilities continue to intensify.
That would explain a raft of recent funding announcements from up-and-coming IP-focused financial and infrastructure plays like Claimy (an AI-powered “rights intelligence” and royalty recovery platform that secured $1.75 million in pre-seed capital in October), MusicInfra (a music technology startup building a “universal clearinghouse” for music rights that secured $5 million in funding in September), and the near-$900 million ‘whole business securitization’ of SESAC, owner of HFA and Rumblefish.
Also on the royalty-collection front, the aforementioned Word Collections rustled up more than $3.2 million in January in a Series B2.
Others are using this moment to flex their core capabilities in areas such as ownership tracking and matching of recording and publishing assets.
That includes Music Reports, whose Songdex platform is tapped by a broad range of music and video streaming platforms; and Legitary, whose stream verification and anomaly-detection technology is being used by major rights conglomerates.
Of course, managing the sprawling financial and backend demands of a vast IP catalog is an intimidating task, to say the least. Though ‘glass half full’ execs chatting with DMN seem less intimidated and more focused on monstrous long-term asset appreciation prospects.
That includes the possibility of drawing additional billions from AI platforms like Udio and Suno, both of which are at the early stages of their licensed, opt-in relaunches. Just one downside: a properly-licensed, next-generation AI music ecosystem will exponentially multiply the demands on global payout platforms like Tipalti – though execs at the mass payment company told DMN they’re absolutely ‘built to scale’.
