A new royalty splitting and payment product for The Orchard, Sony Music's distribution platform, helping labels manage complex artist payments at scale.
The Orchard needed to retain customers in a competitive market. They developed a three-pronged strategy:
Provide better business intelligence
Better tools for managing content
Accounting tools that set us apart from competitors
How might we provide accounting tools that help our customers better run their business?
The Orchard was competitive in most areas, except for one critical feature: paying out royalties. This was a glaring miss in an otherwise strong product offering.
We were matching most of the market, but had one glaring miss.
I recruited users to understand how they currently manage royalties, gathering detailed information about their business size, number of artists, statement formats, and calculation methods.
The research confirmed our hypothesis: royalty management was the most important pain point for our customers.
"Being able to split our net revenue by release to pay band members would be great."
"Really looking forward to see how you include a royalty tool which would take away tons of work, as we still do royalties by hand for each product. :)"
Through interviews with defined personas, we identified specific pain points across different types of users in the music distribution ecosystem.
"Accounting is getting complex and doesn't provide returns. More technology is needed, and I'm not great at that."
"I can do the technology, but customers don't know me as an authority when it comes to accounting."
"We are spending too much time and money figuring out how much we are owed and who we have to pay."
"It takes forever for me to get paid, and I'm not sure it's clear that I'm getting the right amount."
After gathering user feedback, I designed an interface that balanced complexity with usability. The system needed to handle intricate royalty calculations while remaining accessible to users with varying technical expertise.
A friendly welcome was important, as the setup process was complex and we needed to engender trust
Customers decided how much revenue would be split across collaborators
After a payment period has ended, the customer generates a payment to send out to collaborators
A look at the dashboard, showing the revenue split and payment history
The product shipped successfully, but adoption was lower than expected. This led to important insights about product-market fit and the real-world constraints our users faced.
This project taught me that even with strong user research and a well-designed solution, success depends on understanding the full context of adoption — including existing workflows, change management, and technical integration points.
User research should extend beyond feature needs to understand workflow inertia and switching costs. People need compelling reasons to change established processes.
Third-party integrations can make or break product adoption. Payment processors, in particular, need to support all user territories and be easy to understand.