Manager, Royalties

About the position

Joining the growing Royalties team in the United States, the Royalties Manager will manage workflows within a team to assist the Senior Manager of Royalties to ensure publishing royalty revenue collected from US based income sources can be delivered to our clients in an accurate and timely manner by digesting incoming deal terms, translating reporting requirements, executing operational tasks and regularly running a suite of reporting and analysis for the team to execute the reconciliation of receipts to data ensure the efficient and accurate processing of all royalty data received. You will need the ability to remain optimistic and persistent when working to document, revise, track and develop existing processes that enable the team to ingest, allocate and generate royalty payments from incoming royalty data reconciled against Kobalt's database for accurate royalty flow to clients. To effectively support the Senior Manager of Royalties, high levels of confidence in decision making will be required when faced with new process requests and amending existing procedures to keep Kobalt process up to date with changes to incoming reports and industry standards. You will often be required to liaise with key stakeholders within the Royalties department, wider operational department (such as our Global Digital Operations team and Copyright department) tech and client relations teams. This will require excellent communication skills as well as a detail-driven mind-set to translate requirements into concise proposals of action. You will need to be comfortable with working within, building and improving a structured set of processes and leading colleagues responsible for repetitive and data heavy tasks while remaining positive and determined to complete all assignments accurately and efficiently. You will be responsible for managing and developing direct reports in terms of performance and career progression.

Responsibilities

• Support your team in executing and documenting process changes as required to ensure royalty data into Kobalt's bespoke rights management platform is processed efficiently.
• Ensure best practice is developed, documented and maintained so colleagues have the information and direction they require to follow process steps and solve processing exceptions.
• Assist the Senior Manager Royalties in evaluating proposed automated processes and their success, assessing effort vs output to ensure automation levels remain optimal.
• Interpret and communicate information received from a wide range of stakeholders, regarding any changes made to incoming royalty reporting or directly licensed deal structures and ensure our processing methods are altered when necessary.
• Maintain operational awareness of key royalty distributions, support team to solve issues and escalate where appropriate.
• Help set up, maintain and take ownership of processes that track incoming payments expected to ensure completeness of collections.
• Be responsible for the quarterly success rate of our royalty processing.
• Run and keep on top of multiple regular or ad hoc reports so key stakeholders have up to date information required to assess performance of process and evaluate potential impact on client statements.
• Coordinate and manage direct reports, ad hoc needs and development.

Requirements

• Experience with creating, ingesting, interpreting royalty reporting formats across major US Mechanical sources of royalty revenue (TheMLC, YouTube, MRI, HFA, Record Labels)
• Understanding statutory royalty rates across product configurations in the United States
• Understanding of the differences in 115 and non-115 mechanical licensing in the United States
• Confident Excel user
• Familiarity with rights management software, either proprietary or market standard (eg Vistex products)
• Entry level SQL coding capability

Nice-to-haves

• Fluent in workflow management software such as Monday.com or equivalent
• Prior management experience
• Comfortable managing relationships with external stakeholders.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation packages
• Professional development opportunities
• Entrepreneurial culture that makes working here not just fun, but also rewarding.