Clarity, Control and Fair Play: Y Royalties Sets a Global Standard for Music Royalties.
The Gap Between Earned and Collected
Every artist has, at some point, stared at a royalty statement and wondered where the money actually went. Closing that gap between what's earned and what's collected is the reason Y Royalties exists. Headquartered in London with clients and catalogues spanning the UK, Sweden and the US, the firm works across the full lifecycle of music income: tracking it, auditing it, accounting for it, and unlocking its value in deals — with a simple aim: giving artists, songwriters, managers, and investors clarity, control and fair play across the entire music rights journey.
Three Decades in the Making
Y Royalties launched in 2023, but its roots go back nearly three decades, built on founder Colin Young's long-standing accounting and royalty expertise in the music business, gained at his practice CC Young & Co. Colin has been named in Billboard's list of Top Business Managers for the past five years, and that depth of experience underpins a business purpose-built for how the modern royalty system actually operates: global, digital-first, and increasingly complex to track without the right tools behind it.
Scale That Speaks for Itself
The team actively tracks more than £400 million in rights and royalties, has supported over £350 million in music asset transactions, and currently has more than £200 million in royalty income under audit — work that has already surfaced over £12 million in claims and recovered more than £3 million directly for artists and writers, across a dataset of some 3 million musical works. It's meticulous, largely invisible work that now underpins some of the most significant catalogue and artist deals happening across the independent sector on both sides of the Atlantic.
Technology Built for Complexity
A catalogue of any size earns in dozens of currencies, from hundreds of payers, under contracts signed decades apart — far too much for anyone to reconcile by hand. Paritosh Dagar, Chief Technology and AI Officer, leads the technology side of an effort spanning data, royalties and client service, built to make sense of exactly that complexity.
Statements arrive from labels, publishers, societies, and streaming platforms in formats never built to be compared. What's missing often matters more than what's there, and is far harder to spot. A statement period that never turned up. A society that should be reporting and isn't. An escalation that was agreed but never applied. Behind it sits a searchable record of the agreements, amendments and side letters, so the team can pinpoint exactly which terms governed a given period and produce the clause itself. A gap alone is a question; a gap with the clause attached is a claim.
None of this decides the money. The calculations are deterministic — every figure traces back to the statement line it came from, and a person signs off on anything involving judgement. That is what clients ask about, not the AI. It's what lets them put a number in front of a payer and stand behind it — evidence over assumption, which is what fair play looks like in practice.
"Much of what we find was never on the statement in the first place — income that didn't arrive, from a source nobody thought to chase. You only see it by looking at every line rather than a sample, and that's a technology problem. Then it has to hold up in a room with a major label, which is why we don't send anything we can't trace back to source." – Paritosh Dagar
Clarity and Control at a Global Scale
Dom Scialo, Head of Rights Management, has overseen some of the firm's most significant catalogue engagements, including one for a globally recognised artist whose royalty setup had become fragmented across territories, with poor data quality and high admin costs quietly eating into collections. By restructuring how the catalogue was registered and represented worldwide, and aligning collection channels with how the music is actually being consumed, the team secured an industry-first agreement across rights holders that unlocked direct, reliable royalty data at the source — delivering greater transparency, control, and increased earnings for the artist.
"What's changed most in this sector is scale — the catalogues we work on now sit across multiple territories and multiple rights holders, often at the same time. Optimising their catalogue's position in the revenue stream is now more important than ever as consumption channels change and new licensing opportunities develop around the world. Providing clients a single, accurate picture across all of that is the job, and it's what keeps this genuinely interesting work." – Dom Scialo
Looking Ahead
As an independent sector built on cross-border catalogues, collaborations and deals, that global outlook is exactly why Y Royalties is one to watch. The team will be in London for AIM Connected on 10 September, and on the ground in LA in the coming months, always welcoming the chance to compare notes with peers across the independent music community.
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