In this episode, we sit down with Cheryl Potts, the Founder, and CEO of Cleerkut Inc. and Crystal Clear Music, a firm that specializes in providing copyright and royalty administration services to record labels and music publishers. With her extensive experience as a software engineer, Cheryl has developed expertise in automating royalty accounting and ensuring accurate payments to artists. She explains the difficulties involved in documenting and categorizing royalties for multiple songs and artists, often with non-uniform data that contains errors. Cheryl emphasizes the importance of accurate royalty accounting to avoid legal issues and ensure that artists and labels receive the payments they are due.   Cheryl also highlights the ways in which artists can be short-changed, including through misunderstandings of their agreements and clauses that reduce royalty rates. She shares her experience in helping numerous record labels reach RIAA status and developing Licenseyoursong.com, a platform that enables independent music creators to issue their own mechanical licenses.   If your company is looking to scale its AI initiatives, head over to Tesoro AI (www.tesoroai.com). We are experts in AI strategy, staff augmentation, and AI product development. Founder Bio:   Cheryl M. Potts is the Founder and CEO of Cleerkut, Inc. & Crystal Clear Music. She has been a copyright and royalty administrator for independent record labels and music publishers for over 17 years. When one of her clients obtained major label distribution, she needed to automate her royalty accounting process. After looking in the market, she could not find a suitable solution for her needs. She decided to develop a system herself and automate many of her administrative tasks, which led to the creation of Cleerkut Royalty. Cheryl was selected by the U.S. Copyright Office to participate in the music licensing study to provide her views on behalf of independent music creators regarding possible changes to the U.S. Compulsory License. Her comments were included in the final music licensing study conducted by the U.S. Copyright Office. Ms. Potts was a senior software engineer building enterprise software for companies. With her two backgrounds merged together, she designed and built Cleerkut Royalty.   Time Stamps:   03:11 Cheryl’s background and music industry experience 05:12 Automating administration tasks in the music publishing industry 07:04 Understanding the process of recording and publishing royalties 10:00 Royalty accounting and unique identifiers for records 14:50 Benefits of Cleerkut royalty for record labels and music publishers 18:16 Analyzing music sales with analytics and licensing solutions 23:22 Developing the platform and scaling up the team 27:10 Software development and ownership of source code 30:00 Offshore development and royalty accounting 32:20 Reaching out to publishers and labels for product market entry 34:26 Clear music administration services 35:44 Found rising journey at Cleerkut 40:32 Conversation on AI and Copyright law in music publishing 42:20 Deep dive music publishing masterclass 44:03 How to get in contact with the Cleerkut team   Resources   Company website: https://cleerkutroyalty.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cleerkutroyalty/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cleerkutroyalty Twitter: https://twitter.com/cleerkutroyalty