Tipalti has surveyed 714 business leaders about mass-payment systems, identifying operational barriers relevant to music rightsholder payouts. The research covered digitally driven businesses beyond music.
Respondents worked in finance, operations and technology at businesses with mass-payment needs. The findings examine how payment infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI) integration relate to administrative work and growth.
Persistent payment barriers
Music businesses continue to face mismatched metadata, ownership-split problems and delayed royalty payments, despite decades of investment, legislation and litigation. Startups attempting to address these issues have also failed.
Tipalti identified several obstacles in its global payments research:
“Payouts are still too often slowed by manual work, fragmented systems, limited localization, and back-office processes that weren’t built for global scale,”
The survey found that most digital business executives recognised the benefits of effective mass-payment systems, while few were pursuing payout infrastructure as a way to distinguish their businesses.
Findings on AI integration
Tipalti’s research associated mature AI integration with less manual payment work and more favourable assessments of financial infrastructure. Its findings included:
- Organisations with mature AI integrations were 98% more likely to view their financial infrastructure as supporting growth rather than slowing it.
- Those organisations were 45% less likely to need manual intervention in payment processes.
- 43% of companies with well-developed AI systems could rapidly provide accurate, data-backed financial information and analysis to senior leaders, including complex scenarios within hours of an unexpected development or economic change.
These results describe the broader survey population. The research extended beyond music, so the figures do not establish the same outcomes specifically for music businesses.
Royalty administration and AI music
Independent publisher Minds on Fire said changes to its payout and royalty processes enabled fast, accurate payments to songwriters worldwide with little administrative work, giving the business a competitive advantage.
The source describes “AI Music 2.0” as an early-stage development that could include licensed platforms drawing on large collections of intellectual property within closed systems.
Scaling those platforms could introduce additional stakeholders and more complex compensation requirements.
Rob Israch, Tipalti’s President, said:
“The music industry has been wrestling with rightsholder payouts for decades, and AI Music 2.0 is going to raise the stakes considerably. What our research and discussions with business leaders keep showing us is that the companies thriving in complex payout environments are the ones that made a deliberate decision to invest in the infrastructure early as a future enabler for the business. That lesson applies directly to where the music industry is headed.”
