Senior Manager - Royalty Accounting & Operations

Established in 2015, Create Music Group is a leading music and entertainment company. The company operates as a record label, distribution company, and entertainment network which generates over 15 billion music streams each month on DSP’s. Named #2 on the Inc 5000 Fastest Growth Companies in America in 2020, the company has grown exponentially by leveraging its owned IP with its media and technology platform. The company works with superstar artists, major and independent record labels, and global media brands. It operates a number of companies including Label Engine, one of the largest independent music distribution platforms in the world, with over 75,000 artists and 5,000 label clients; and Flighthouse, a digital entertainment brand focused on Gen Z,  which has more than 300 million followers across social media. Create Music Group is based in Hollywood, CA and has 400 employees worldwide.

Job Summary

Create Music Group's catalog grows by acquisition several times a year, and every acquisition arrives as more statements, more payors, and more reconciliation. The Senior Manager, Royalty Accounting & Operations owns the accuracy and the throughput of that machine.

You will be the technical authority on how revenue moves from a payor statement into our royalty systems and out to a client statement. You are the person the royalty managers escalate to when a reconciliation does not tie. And you are the person who replaces manual processing with automated ingestion so the function scales without scaling headcount. This role will partner daily with Finance, A&R, and Data Engineering, and you will have real authority to stop work that is not right.

Responsibilities

• Own reconciliation across all revenue sources - statement vs. summary vs. cash receipt. Set the standard the team reconciles to, and resolve the variances that do not tie.
• Manage the Royalties Manager and the Royalties Administration Manager. Set the technical standard the teams work to, and serve as first-line technical authority on calculation, allocation, withholding, and recoupment questions those managers cannot resolve. Escalations are acknowledged within one business day; questions that set new precedent, cross a defined dollar threshold, or span multiple payors go to the Director within the same 48-hour window.
• Own the tracking and ingestion of incoming Letters of Direction (LODs) end to end: master tracker, ingestion format per payor, cash reconciliation, and withholding correctness.
• Own statement ingestion automation and workflow optimization. Expand automated ingestion to the highest-volume and most convoluted sources, and retire manual handling.
• Set, publish, and hold the operational KPIs for ingestion throughput and backlog burn-down. Report progress monthly to the Director, and co-present quarterly progress to the SVP alongside the Director
• Partner with Data Engineering and Analytics to move statement ingestion, matching, and reporting off spreadsheets. Act as the royalty domain owner for the statement and calculation modules of the company's next-generation platform: define requirements, write acceptance criteria, and work with product and engineering through delivery. Final roadmap prioritization is a joint call with Product and Engineering leadership.
• Collaborate with Finance on deal-level performance reporting. Supply the royalty data and process interpretation that ties operational reality to deal economics.
• Perform statement and payor analysis on incoming acquisitions during diligence, not after close. Identify errors and revenue-integration risks in transaction documentation before they become configuration problems.
• Build the Royalty Readiness Assessment for every acquisition and issue a formal recommendation to accept or refuse the post-close handoff packet. The Director holds the countersignature and final refusal authority, acting on the recommendation within 48 hours.
• Manage, mentor, and develop the team - royalty depth on the administration side, analytical range on the statements side - and document knowledge that currently lives in individual heads.
• Other duties as assigned

Qualifications 

• Bachelor's degree in accounting, finance, business, music business, or information systems, or an equivalent combination of education and experience; in lieu of a degree, 5+ years of demonstrated experience in the music business will be considered
• 4+ years in music royalty operations, royalty accounting, or income tracking at a label, publisher, distributor, or royalty administrator, including owning a full statement cycle end to end
• 2+ years of people management experience, ideally including managing other managers, or clearly ready to step into that
• Direct, hands-on experience processing royalty statements at volume. This is not a corporate accounting, financial reporting, or FP&A role.
• Deep working knowledge of inbound royalty statement processing: locating, ingesting, templating, matching, and validating statements from DSPs, distributors, PROs, licensees, and similar sources
• Reconciliation discipline across sources - statement detail to summary to cash received. You can size a variance, chase the material ones, document the rest, and explain any of it to the dollar and to the cause.
• Strong command of core royalty accounting concepts: advances and recoupment, splits, reserves, accruals, withholding, and FX. You know that reporting month and cash month are not the same month
• Able to read a contract or deal memo and trace how its terms should show up in a calculation
• Working knowledge of at least one enterprise royalty platform (Label Engine, Curve, Vistex Music Maestro or Record Maestro, Counterpoint, SR1, or a comparable in-house system), and the ability to learn new ones quickly
• Advanced Excel or Google Sheets capability: pivot tables, lookups, SUMIFS, data validation, and confident handling of high-volume data across many files
• Experience acting as the escalation point for other royalty staff. You are the person others bring the calculation nobody can explain.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including explaining a royalty outcome to a non-royalty audience
• Organized and accurate under close-cycle deadlines

Bonus Qualifications

• Working knowledge of SQL against a cloud data warehouse: able to run and adapt a query to pull or sanity-check royalty data. You do not need to write it from scratch - we will get you there.
• Experience administering a Letter of Direction program in a high-volume acquisition environment: cataloging and documenting new and historical LODs, creating and managing ingestion templates, cross-team coordination with AR and M&A, statement access management and administration
• Experience automating statement ingestion in any form: Power Query, Access, Python, or vendor import tooling
• Experience analyzing statements or payor mixes for an acquisition or catalog onboarding
• Familiarity with DDEX or DSR reporting standards
• Experience with BI or reporting tools such as Sigma, Looker, Tableau, or Power BI
• Background at a major label, large independent, or distributor

Pay Scale

• $90,000 - $120,000 USD per year
• The final compensation within this range will be determined based on the candidate’s experience, skills, and overall fit for the role.

Fair Chance Policy

In accordance with the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider employment for qualified applicants with criminal histories. We evaluate candidates based on their qualifications and the nature of the offense in relation to the job for which they are applying.