Keeping control of your work — and of your money

The music is finished. And that is when everything around it starts.

Who registers the work, and where. Which organisation collects for which use. Whether a publisher takes it on, or you keep it yourself. What happens when a piece runs in three countries and pays out through four intermediaries. None of that is what you trained for. All of it decides what you earn.

The decision nobody prepares you for

Do it yourself, or hand it to a publisher? There is no general answer. A publisher brings reach, administration and, depending on the deal, placements — and takes a share for it. Keeping it yourself means keeping the full share, and the decisions and the administration with it.

Both are legitimate paths. But you can only choose between them if you can see what you actually have: which works exist, which recordings belong to them, what is registered where, and what each of them earned. Without that overview, the decision is guesswork — you are negotiating without knowing your own numbers.

Many hands on the same value

Between your work and your account sit performing rights organisations (PROs), labels, distributors, sync agencies and service providers. Each has its own logic, its own reporting, its own vocabulary, its own schedule. Every step is legally correct and individually plausible. Together they are hard to see through.

That is what a royalty statement looks like when it arrives: a long spreadsheet in which the total is visible and the path to it is not. You can read what came in. Reading why is a different task.

The part nobody enjoys

Then there is the bookkeeping. Keeping metadata consistent, tracking registrations, sorting statements, having the numbers ready at the end of the year. It is unglamorous work, it makes no sound, and it is precisely the work that decides whether you are paid correctly.

It is easy to put off. Not out of carelessness — the usual tool for it is a spreadsheet, and a spreadsheet does not know what a work is, what a recording is, or how the two relate.

Why cueliszt exists

I went looking for something that would hold both halves together: the catalog and the money. One place where every work and every recording lives, with its metadata and its registration status — and where a statement is decoded line by line, by work, source and amount.

I did not find it. So I built it.

cueliszt runs on your Mac. Your whole catalog stays queryable on your Mac, and your data lives on your devices and in your private iCloud — never on our servers. Built by a developer from the music industry — not a tech giant. By someone who knows how a sync cue hides on a royalty statement.

Control over your own work is not a matter of attitude. It is a matter of overview. Everything else follows from that.