Cugate AG  Berlin  /  since 1992

CuManage

Owning your own service means owning the payroll behind it. That is the part nobody your size can hire.

FULL SYSTEM ACCESS FROM 1 JANUARY 2027  /  WORKING TITLE

Reeperbahn Festival 2026, Streaming Economy: „After Streaming: Who Gets to Own the Music Business Next?“

WHAT ARRIVES AT YOUR DESK ONE LAYER WHAT YOU CAN ACT ON Spotify statements Apple Music statements YouTube CMS reports Amazon statements Deezer statements Aggregator summaries Society statements Publisher statements Content ID claims Territory rules ISRC and ISWC lists Contracts and addenda Twelve sources. Different formats, different identifiers, different periods, no common key. CuManage 61% clean, registered, attributed this part already works 17% composition side never collected 9% paid to whoever claimed it first 13% lines nobody can match 39 percent of a year decided without you. Now it has a name, a number and an owner.
Specimen figures, shown to make the shape of the problem visible. The left column is what a catalogue owner actually receives every month. The right column is what a decision can be based on.
01

The staff list you inherit the day you run your own service

  • Rights managerWhich right, which territory, which term, recording and composition kept apart.
  • Metadata engineerIdentifiers that match across every portal, every asset defined before it ships.
  • Claims officerEvery claim watched and answered inside each portal’s own window, catalogue-wide.
  • Reporting analystHundreds of thousands of statement lines turned into figures a decision can rest on.
  • AccountantSplits, withholding, and reserves held against claims that land months later.
  • Marketing unitSocial, new SEO, targeted advertising, creators, influencers, KOL.
  • Design and videoArtwork, thumbnails, trailers, formats, at release cadence.
  • Data analystWhich release, which market, which audience, and what to do next.

Eight functions, permanently staffed. For an independent label, artist or producer the payroll passes the revenue long before the catalogue does.

02

CuManage is that department, as a system

  • Identity that holds up Two granted European patents put a provable identity on the asset itself: EP1684263B1 audio fingerprint and EP1684265B1 digital watermarking, plus the registered Cugate Virtual Barcode (DPMA 30 2023 008 078). A claim gets answered with evidence, not with an assertion.
  • Rights and registration Recording and composition handled separately, per territory, cleared before release rather than after. We run our own publishing house, so the composition side is not somebody else’s problem.
  • Reporting turned into figures Millions of statement lines from portals that use different identifiers, name assets inconsistently and withhold the consumer detail. CuManage reconciles them into country, age, gender and device, the picture that was obvious when records were sold in shops.
  • Money held correctly Reserve logic so revenue that can still be claimed is not settled as final, and claim windows are tracked per portal rather than per assumption.
  • Advice that gets measured Every release carries a written recommendation, locked at publication, then compared against the result and corrected. The system proposes market entries from what has already worked in our own catalogue, not from opinion.
  • One page per person Channel manager, designer, video producer, marketing: one person, one task, one page, in their reading language, every figure explained where it stands.
03

The route is changing. The obligations underneath it are not.

A new generation of services is arriving: channels owned by the community that listens to them, models where the listener keeps what they buy, payment that reaches the artist the moment someone presses play. The direction is right and we support it.

What it changes is how the money is shared and how a listener relates to a release. What it does not change is the eight functions above, or what a rights owner still owes the composition side.

For the first years nobody gives up the exploitation they already have. Labels, artists and producers will run a new service and their existing channels at the same time. Two structures, one catalogue, one set of rights, and one place where all of it has to reconcile. That is the layer we bring, and it works the same underneath any of them.

So we stay route-agnostic on purpose. We keep a working roster of the services worth considering, from the established aggregators to the newer ownership models, and we introduce a partner to whichever one fits their catalogue. We sell none of them and we are tied to none of them.

B2B2CB2C2CC2C OWNERSHIPCONSUMER BENEFITNEW SEOTARGETED REACHPROVABLE IDENTITYRESERVESMEASURED ADVICE
04

Availability

  • channels.cugate.com in production across the 28-channel portfolio, advice loop piloted on Cugate Classics Club.

  • Own concert video channel launches as a SmartTV application.

  • Pilot partners outside Cugate, with locked pre-release advice measured against actual results.

  • General availability for independent labels, producers, artists and small and medium-sized media companies.

Rail-agnostic by design. CuManage competes with neither a distributor nor a community-owned service. It is the department underneath both.

05

Why we can say this

1,500+
audio productions since 1992, classical, jazz, lounge, new folk
150+
video productions, plus 6,000 albums under own control
28
YouTube channels operated in house
16 yrs
per-track revenue history across territories and formats

We built CuManage because we needed it ourselves, on our own catalogue, against our own reporting. It is in production now. From 1 January 2027 it is open to everyone else who has the same problem and cannot hire eight people to solve it.