Photo Credit: Jonas Leupe

ValuePunks, the catalog valuation platform built by Swiss music technology company Tribe Music Group AG, is extending its offering into publishing this week. This free valuation gives songwriters, composers, and publishers a quick, transparent way to value their catalogs. Composition income from mechanicals, performance, sync, and beyond now get the same revenue stream valuation breakdown treatment as recordings—at no cost to songwriters and composers.

This article was created in collaboration with DMN partner ValuePunks.

The platform shows rights holders what their catalog is worth and what’s actually driving that value across both recording and publishing rights. The service focuses squarely on the people who make music: artists, songwriters, composers, and the independent labels and publishers who work with them. ValuePunks gives these music professionals increased insight, so they can walk into any deal knowing exactly what they hold.

Anyone who has spent time around a publishing deal knows the asymmetry going in. The recording side of the music business has had real valuation tools for a while now; publishing has lagged behind and for good reason. Composition income is split across mechanicals, performance royalties, sync, and a handful of other line items, each running through its own society or administrator, who have their own reporting cadence. Getting a clear read on what a catalog of works is actually worth has typically meant paying for it.

ValuePunk’s underlying approach carries over from the recording side: no single blended multiple standing in for the whole catalog. Each revenue stream is modeled on its own terms, since each earns and decays differently. From there, the results are summed into one figure to give songwriters a better idea of what their whole catalog is worth. On the recording side, that already covers streaming, physical, direct-to-consumer, sync, neighboring rights, and licensing. Publishing adds mechanical, performance, and sync income, plus other publishing revenue lines, calculated separately rather than folded into a rough average.

The models themselves aren’t built on assumption. They’re calibrated against royalty audits on catalogs earning more than €100 million a year, run through Royalty Radar, the audit platform Tribe built to surface missing and uncollected royalty income. From there, the catalog is checked against consumption data spanning more than 120,000 catalogs and millions of songs. Royalty Radar sits alongside License Radar, Tribe’s tool for finding songs monetized without a license, as part of the same effort to give rights holders a clearer, more current read on how their catalogs are performing.

The publishing side of the business brings one additional layer that the recordings side didn’t require—matching. A user builds a catalog from an artist name, a set of tracks, or an ISWC import, and ValuePunks maps the underlying works to every recording of them, including live versions, remixes, and covers before running the valuation. That matching step is what turns a bare list of compositions into an actual earnings picture, showing where the money is coming from and from which version of the work.

It also addresses a lag that publishing has lived with for a long time. Mechanical royalties tend to reach songwriters nine to twelve months after the music actually played, with performance income arriving on a similar delay. Any valuation built off those statements is describing a market that has already moved on. ValuePunks instead draws on live consumption data, so the figure reflects what a catalog is earning now rather than what it earned almost a year ago.

ValuePunks worked quickly in July to roll out the recording side of its valuation tool. Rights holders onboarded catalogs representing more than €50 million in annual royalties within the first 48 hours, and the total across the platform now exceeds €300 million.

“Giving this away free to artists and labels was a punk thing to do, and the same logic has to hold for the people who actually wrote and composed the songs,” Constantin Thyssen, Co-Founder & CEO of ValuePunks tells Digital Music News. “They sit right at the start of the value chain and end up the least informed about what it’s worth. So publishing gets the same treatment: a real, professional valuation, free, for the writers themselves.”

“Publishing is a matching problem before it’s a valuation problem,” adds Dr. Nils Flaschel, Co-Founder, CTO & Head of Data Science at ValuePunks. “You have to connect a composition to every recording of it before you can see what it earns and only then value it, modelling mechanical, performance, and sync income individually rather than compressing them into one generic multiple. The principle is the same on both sides of the rights equation: understand the cash flows first, then value the catalog.”

So what’s now free for songwriters and publishers?

*Built a publishing catalog from an artist name, individual tracks, or an ISWC import

* Automatic matching of works to their recordings, including live versions, remixes, and covers

* Mechanical, performance, sync, and other publishing income is valued separately and then combined into a sum-of-parts figure

* Up-to-date valuations drawn from live consumption data rather than royalty statements that are months old

* Publishing and master rights valued side-by-side, in one place, on the same methodology

Publishing valuation has arrived at an unusual moment for the industry: catalog transactions are still happening at pace, multiples are under more scrutiny than they were a few years ago, and administrators, societies, and DSPs are producing more granular data than they know what to do with. Meanwhile, songwriters and composers are still the ones furthest from that data and the most reliant on statements that lag behind for the better part of a year.

ValuePunks provides a real, current revenue stream-level valuation at no cost, helping to close the gap with the recording side of the business. It can also change who walks into a negotiation with an accurate picture of what’s on the table—something that has traditionally been inaccessible for most songwriters and composers.