MusicData Lab

Your Music Data, Finally Unified

Aggregating millions of streaming records from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more into a unified royalty data integration system.

The Challenge

13 Distributors, 5 File Formats, Zero Standards

Every month, labels receive royalty reports from 12+ distributors — not a single one looks the same. The cost: delayed royalty payments, reporting errors, eroded trust, and finance teams doing data cleanup instead of analysis.

Inconsistent Naming

ADA sends 'Release Artist', Merlin says 'Artist name', Orchard uses 'Artist Name' — same data, different languages across every distributor.

Format Chaos

CSV, XLSX, XLSB, XLS, TSV — with quirks like XLS files containing CSV, mixed encodings, metadata headers, and multi-sheet workbooks.

Massive Scale Differences

From 6KB Bandcamp CSV files to 700MB Orchard reports — 18 adapters across 500+ files per year per label.

Wasted Time

Finance teams spend hours on manual data cleanup instead of actual analysis, delaying royalty payments and eroding artist trust.

By the Numbers

Built for Scale

Millions

Streaming records processed

17+

Active adapters

50+

File format variations

<15s

Report generation

5-10M

New records per month

<1s

Full-text search

2-3h

To add new distributor

Standardised output fields

Approaches

How Does It Compare?

There are many ways to handle royalty data. Only one scales reliably.

Approach	Setup	Maintenance	Format Changes	Scales
Manual spreadsheets	None	Hours/month	Breaks silently	More hours per source
Generic ETL	Medium	Low	Limited	Only if connector exists
Custom Python scripts	High	High/fragile	Depends on dev	New script per source
Adapter-based pipeline	High upfront	Low	Adapter update only	Add adapter, done

Supported Platforms

17+ Distributors and Growing

Each distributor gets a dedicated adapter that handles its quirks. Adding a new one takes 2-3 hours.

Major Distributors

ADA (Warner), The Orchard (Sony), Merlin, FUGA (Downtown), Believe, TuneCore, DistroKid, CD Baby

Platforms

Bandcamp, Qello, SoundCloud, YouTube Music, TikTok, Meta

Regional

Phonofile (Nordic), Zebralution (Germany), IDOL (France), Altafonte (Spain/LatAm)

Architecture

Universal Base + Specialised Adapters

Every distributor report maps to 20 standardised fields. The adapter handles the quirks; downstream systems get clean, uniform data.

Identification

Artist, Track, Product, Label, UPC, EAN, ISRC

Location

Country code (ISO), Territory

Time

Year, Month, Period begin/end

Financial

Currency, Units, Unit price, Income, Income type, Retailer, Service type

Value

Not Another Dashboard

Not another dashboard on top of messy data — the data layer underneath that turns chaos into clarity.

Clean Data Foundation

Unified, validated data from every distributor. Query once, get answers across all sources.

Automated Pipeline

Drop files, adapters parse them, data lands in your warehouse. No manual intervention.

Battle-Tested

Python, Elasticsearch, Celery + Redis, PostgreSQL, Docker. Running in production on Digital Ocean.

Experimental

AI-Native Tools for Music Data

We're exploring a new way to interact with music data — open-source MCP servers that let AI assistants query, analyse, and manage your catalogue directly. No dashboards, no clicks — just ask.

MCP Bandcamp

Query Bandcamp sales reports, revenue by artist, top items, and fee breakdowns — all from your AI assistant.

Open Source

MCP Metadata

Read and write audio metadata tags (title, artist, album, ISRC, genre) in MP3, FLAC, and OGG files programmatically.

Open Source

MCP FUGA

Query FUGA (Downtown) royalty reports, catalogue data, and distribution analytics through your AI assistant.

Coming Soon

Team

Meet the Experts Behind MusicData Lab

Mariusz Smenżyk

Lead AI Developer

PYTHONARCHITECTUREDATA PIPELINES

Fatiha Ben Brahim

Metadata Expert & Music Rights Consultant

METADATARIGHTS MANAGEMENTDUE DILIGENCE

Maciej Dulski

Business Development

SALESPARTNERSHIPSSTRATEGY

Clients

Trusted by

Case Study

Your Music Data, Finally Unified

How we aggregated millions of streaming records from Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and more into a unified royalty data integration system.

Jack Clough

Digital Manager @ Cherry Red Records

Working with MusicTech Lab has been a pleasure. The team provided us with helpful regular updates across the development process, and went above and beyond in delivering additional features and ideas. Their ability to problem-solve and resolve any issues swiftly helped deliver an excellent final product.

Matt Bristow

Director @ Cherry Red Records

MusicTech Lab built us an incredibly useful piece of software and delivered on budget — doing a thoroughly professional and diligent job throughout the whole process.

Get Started

Struggling with Messy Royalty Data?

We built this system and we can tailor it for your label. Tell us about your data challenges.

Maciej Dulski

Business Partner

+48 661 713 000

Book a call

Questions

Got Questions? We've Got Answers

Let's talk about your data