Photo Credit: Flou
For all the attention paid to missing music metadata, copyright infringement, and royalty battles, the music industry often overlooks a potentially bigger issue: chaotic music contracting. Enter Flou, whose CEO, Alexiomar Rodriguez, is helming one of the more promising missions in the music industry: to fix the chaos that surrounds music agreements. Here’s a breakdown of his vision for ‘Music Contracts 2.0’ — including a detailed white paper.
What’s wrong with music contracts? For the answer to that question, one must start at the beginning — i.e., the first draft of an agreement.
Bad deals happen, and plenty of court cases focus on missed deliverables and differing interpretations. However, according to Flou founder and CEO Alexiomar Rodriguez, the bigger problem lies in the chaos surrounding the contract drafting, signing, and post-signature stages.
Rodriguez — an Orlando-based music attorney who cut his teeth in the music industry hotbed of Puerto Rico — battled the same pile of shared docs and ‘versioning hell’ familiar to lawyers, labels, and artists alike. In response, Flou is aiming to reengineer the entire music contracting process, and replace the current chaos with a SaaS-like update that prevents downstream disagreements, metadata issues, and missed deliverables.
Just recently, DMN joined forces with Flou to accelerate the industry’s shift to a completely different contracting approach. The very real possibility is that in just a few years, it’s entirely possible that the music industry lands in a totally different — and saner — place.
Investors love this kind of problem/solution startup — and Flou is focused on a specific music industry problem. But what is ‘Music Contracts 2.0’?
At its core, Flou’s ‘Music Contracts 2.0’ system features a centralized ‘Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM)’ platform that replaces a constellation of disconnected applications and sharing protocols like Gmail and Dropbox. On the creation side, Flou also includes automating contract drafting with templates and forms, streamlining sending, signing, and storing contracts with tracking and notifications, and integrating with other management and royalty systems.
The logical solution is rooted in serious pain — felt every day by lawyers, artists, and everyone in between. “Current music contract management is messy, outdated, and leads to lawsuits, lost money, delayed releases, missed payments, and broken relationships,” Rodriguez relayed.
Surprisingly, current contracting still features paper-based systems, manual tracking, and reliance on email and spreadsheets. It’s not that the tools themselves are bad, but they are rarely interconnected and frequently impossible to track cohesively. The result is a familiar, headache-producing swirl of disjointed elements.
Flou envisions a 2.0 replacement that accelerates deal-making and offers better control on both sides of the table, as well as stronger privacy protection, time savings, reduced costs, and increased efficiency.
“Flou is specifically designed for the music industry with pre-made templates, bilingual contracts, smart automation, and a secure central location for all contracts,” Rodriguez explained.
“Our goal is to shift the music industry from a slow, stressful, and expensive contract process to a fast, simple, and clear one, ultimately turning contracts into an advantage rather than a headache.”
If this sounds like a glass of ice water in your current hell, check out the white paper below – and theflou.com for more info.
Content shared from www.digitalmusicnews.com.