Bypass Royalty Payouts Roadblocks—How Tipalti Helps Music Businesses Scale Globally

Many established music industry businesses are hesitant to upgrade their payment infrastructure, held back by misconceptions that migrating these systems is complex or risky. In reality, holding back because of these perceived barriers can actually increase business risk with inefficient or unreliable payee experiences, global payout regulation complexity, or disconnected workflows limiting business scale. With Tipalti Mass Payments, migration is straightforward, automated, and can be strategically valuable for publishers, rights holders, and music platforms.

This article was created in collaboration with DMN partner Tipalti.

A major misconception is that moving global royalty payouts operations to a modern platform requires high engineering effort and causes operational disruption. However, Tipalti Mass Payments removes these barriers through automated payee onboarding, powered by 26,000 built-in validation rules that reduce payout errors by up to 66%.

Tipalti’s self-service payee portal also operates 24/7 and includes a KPMG-approved, guided tax engine that ensures compliance and reporting accuracy while minimizing lift for finance teams. Tipalti provides branded proactive communications, which greatly reduces payouts inquiries. Tipalti’s customers’ payments flow smoothly once set up, resulting in dramatically fewer support touchpoints once live.

Tipalti Mass Payments is custom-tailored to help music businesses move beyond consumer-grade payment tools, where they may face issues like limited payment methods and currency coverage, as well as rising operational costs from these piecemeal processes. With Tipalti, businesses can easily automate payouts in 200+ countries and territories and 120 currencies, and offer payment methods—from wire transfers, ACH (US/Global), PayPal, prepaid debit, to paper checks.

Another major strength for transitioning from legacy payment systems is that Tipalti offers global multi-entity management, which allows companies to scale internationally without losing control over their branding, tax onboarding, and payee communication. With centralized visibility and configuration, each subsidiary or label can operate autonomously, without losing compliance or brand cohesion.

Friction-Free Adoption Offers Strategic Value—Here’s How

Tipalti’s automated compliance combines sanctions screening, tax validation, and multi-currency payout controls, which removes headaches for teams handling royalties, payouts, and partner billing. Unlike consumer-grade payment platforms that struggle with complex tax and AML requirements, Tipalti ensures regulatory-grade oversight and audit-ready visibility across every transaction, globally.

Regulatory penalties for lack of proper financial controls or inconsistent handling of tax obligations at a global scale can cause serious business impact and reputational harm. Support issues compound these compliance gaps, leaving companies struggling with frozen funds or delayed transfers to payees during periods of heightened regulatory scrutiny.

These events can cause significant business disruption, particularly where high-volume payouts flow to global rights holders, artists, and publishers. Choosing a business-focused provider that invests in proactive compliance avoids these headaches entirely thanks to rigorous, tried-and-true validation processes.

For music businesses like Vydia—a leading cloud-based platform for artists and labels—the complexity of managing large-scale royalty payouts and advances was once a manual process that risked delays and errors. As their roster of artists and labels expanded, each new deal multiplied payment volume and complexity, which turned the mid-month royalty disbursement cycle into a high-pressure, manually intensive process fraught with potential risk of delays and errors.

Vydia’s previous legacy workflows—heavily reliant on manual batch file uploads—struggled to consistently keep pace with the intricate and varied payment structures, particularly for advances tied to top-performing artists. Recognizing that this approach was unsustainable for their accelerating growth, Vydia strategically transitioned to Tipalti.

That transition gave Vydia a centralized platform that simplified complex royalty and advance disbursements, allowing the company to transform its once high-pressure ‘payout day’ into a more controlled, transparent, and scalable workflow that supports its rapid global expansion.