Pre-allocations, what are they and why should I use them?

Recently we’ve been working a lot on incorporating a pre-allocation system into Label Engine, but what are pre-allocations and why should you care?

Well, with the standard way that most of you are used to doing your accounts with Label Engine, each time you upload a new statement you see a list of your royalties and work your way through them allocating a percentage of each royalty to each artist, remixer and company that was involved. If you’ve allocated a similar royalty before, Label Engine will use the same allocations you used previously so long as the isrc code or track name are the same

With pre-allocations, you are able to set the percentage of each royalty that each party receives ahead of time. When you go to allocate each royalty Label Engine will search through all your pre-allocations to find a match, and if found suggest those allocations to you. If a match is not found, Label Engine allows you to quickly search through a list of your pre-allocations to find the track you are looking for. So say for example you receive a royalty from a store for ‘Lazy Rich – Better Wipe That Up’ – just type ‘Lazy Rich’ into the search box and that will show you all pre-allocations for that artist (whoever he is) – simply click the right track and your royalty will be allocated correctly. It also helps when your distributor supplies incomplete or incorrect royalty listings, or only supplies the ISRC code. Using pre-allocations means you don’t need to maintain a list or mental record of how much each artist is supposed to receive for each track, because everything is saved in Label Engine. This means an increase in consistency, accuracy and speed.

Another huge benefit is that Label Engine will automatically calculate the correct royalty allocations for a release based upon the pre-allocations you have set for each individual track. This saves you from having to calculate the percentages each artist should receive on large compilations. Label Engine will even perform matches based on the release name if you have it saved.

Different pre-allocations can be set for different combinations of vendor or territory, so if you feel the need to offer artists different percentages of royalties on tracks sold from Beatport to the French, you can do so. It’s also very easy to ignore a pre-allocation should you have a special case to deal with.

So how do you go about setting pre-allocations? Well, if you’re a distribution customer you will have already set your pre-allocations for each track every time you have submitted it to us – those percentages you’ve been entering are used to determine how much of the sales your artist receives. All of your royalties from us have been allocated automatically based on those figures – yes, you’re welcome 🙂

If you aren’t distributing with us (wait, what do you mean you aren’t?), there are two ways to set pre-allocations. The first way is to visit the accounts section and either review / edit your release or add in a new one. Once your tracks have been added correctly, hit the ‘Pre-Allocations’ link. The view you’ll see is similar to when you allocate a royalty – you enter the artists that were responsible for the track and enter in the percentage of royalties they should receive and can select which account it is paid into for them (check for a post on accounts coming soon). Towards the top of the page you’ll see that you are entering pre-allocations for the Default Split – this means that these are the allocations that will be used regardless of which territory or vendor the royalty is from. If you want to add in a different set of pre-allocations for a certain split, that’s the place to do it (look out for a post on splits soon too). This is also the place to edit the pre-allocations if you are a distribution user – just note that you wont be able to delete any artists that you’ve set as being artists on the track, if you don’t want them to receive anything set their share to 0.00%.

The second way involves using the grouping page. If you haven’t used it already, the grouping page is the place where you sort all of your received royalties by catalogue number so that you can tally the amount you have made (or lost) on each track and release. If you haven’t already been doing so, we highly recommend going through the grouping section in detail and getting everything in order as it really will benefit you in the longterm. Once you have everything in order, go the the catalogue number you wish to set pre-allocations for and create a release if you have not already done so. Once created, click ‘Solo’ to view that release on its own as this will save having to load all releases each time you make a change. Clicking each track in the release will show you all of the royalties that have been received and linked to that track, clicking on each royalty will show you the allocations used and underneath you will have the options to ‘Use these pre-allocations’. Simply click that link to use the shown allocations as your pre-allocations for that track – doing so will then highlight the other royalties received as blue if they match the pre-allocations you’ve just set or red if they do not, meaning you can easily can back and edit past royalties to make sure they are correct. To do so, just click on a royalty and follow the prompts.

So, in summary then, pre-allocations are a little complicated, but we really encourage you to give them a try, it will make things much quicker and easier for you in the long-run.

The pre-allocations system is accessible to all accounting and full subscription users, plus all distribution users. If you need any help getting things set up, or getting your head around them, just send us an email – support@label-engine.com.