Music labels and the agents who represent artists face a cataloguing problem that anyone who has managed a collection will recognise. The metadata for a single track — who wrote it, who performed it, who owns what share of the rights, which collecting societies hold registrations, which broadcast monitoring services have been notified — is extensive, interconnected, and governed by industry standards that carry legal weight. When that information is held across spreadsheets, inboxes, and separate systems, errors compound and compliance becomes impossible to assure.
TuneTrust is a web-based portal that brings all of that information together in one place, accessible to labels, agents, and the artists themselves.
A catalogue built on the industry’s own standards
The system manages three linked record types — artists, releases, and tracks — each carrying the full set of identifiers the industry requires. Artist records hold ISNI numbers, IPN registrations, and PRO memberships alongside contact directories for management, booking, and press. Release records carry UPC, EAN, and catalogue numbers, full publisher chains including sub-publisher territory detail, and submission status fields tied directly to Luminate and Mediabase, the dominant broadcast monitoring services in the US. Track records capture ISRC and ISWC codes, BPM, key, time signature, lyrics, and a full chain of credits and rights ownership down to individual contributors.
The depth of this data model will be familiar to anyone who has managed a collection management system. The principles are the same: a controlled vocabulary, structured identifiers, and relational links between records that allow the data to be queried reliably and submitted to external registries in the correct form.
Secure storage for digital assets
Each artist, release, and track in the system has its own file storage area, backed by AWS S3 cloud storage. Artwork, audio masters, biographical documents, and supporting materials can be uploaded, organised into folders, and downloaded through a browser without any technical knowledge. Files intended for preview are stored in an encrypted form; a listener accessing a preview stream receives a time-limited link rather than the original file, protecting the asset from redistribution.
Controlled access for every stakeholder
The portal uses a two-tier access model. An agent account can manage multiple artists from a single login; an artist account sees only their own catalogue. Every query in the system enforces this boundary at the database level, so there is no risk of one subscriber seeing another’s data. Labels can administer the system centrally through a standard WordPress back end without touching any code.
Public-facing release previews give labels control over what is visible to the wider world. Releases can be marked private during the preparation period and made public at release, with in-browser audio playback for authorised listeners.
A familiar architecture in an unfamiliar industry
TuneTrust is built as a WordPress plugin, meaning it installs into any existing WordPress site and works alongside the host organisation’s existing theme and content. There is no separate application to host, no parallel login system to maintain. The catalogue sits inside a platform that editorial and communications teams already know how to use.
The underlying approach — structured metadata, asset management, controlled subscriber access, and public discovery — is one that cultural organisations have navigated for decades in the context of collections. TuneTrust applies the same logic to the music industry’s own complex rights and compliance environment.