Lemoncake
Building a Secure, Multi-Stakeholder Platform for Music Rights, Distribution & Usage Reporting
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Background
Lemoncake is a platform serving composers, agents, publishers, and music collectives by offering tools for music tracks, albums, licensing, and rights management. It enables music creators and rights holders to manage their catalogues, monitor usage, distribute revenue, and facilitate licensing and distribution. As the music industry becomes more data-driven, Lemoncake identified that many of its stakeholders were relying on fragmented workflows, excel spreadsheets, API feeds of varying formats, and manual reconciliations — all of which introduced inefficiencies, delays, and reduced transparency in how usage, licensing, and fees were calculated and distributed.
Lemoncake needed a unified, secure software system and web portals that could accommodate multiple types of users (composers, agents, publishers, customers, collectives) and support functions including track and album management, distribution lists, automated calculations of usage fees, integration with external agent APIs / data feeds, PDF generation (for invoices, statements), scheduling, and more. They engaged 6B to design and build this comprehensive system in PHP to streamline operations, improve transparency, and scale as usage and catalogue sizes grew.
The Need
The disjointed tools and manual processes in place were causing bottlenecks in operations. Composers and publishers were struggling with lack of visibility into how often their tracks were used, delays in payments, and inconsistencies in how usage data from different agents or platforms was processed. Agents needed easier ways to feed data into Lemoncake from external systems via APIs or cleaned data feeds. Customers and collectives wanted accurate, timely invoicing and statements. Internally, Lemoncake required a system that could take all of this, handle scheduled tasks (for example collecting usage data, generating usage reports), compute usage fees according to different agreements, generate invoices and statements in PDF form, and distribute revenue accordingly — all while ensuring data security, role-based permissions, scalability, and auditability.
The Solution
6B worked closely with Lemoncake to deliver a PHP-based platform and web portals that met all the diverse stakeholder needs. The core system supports multiple roles — composers, agents, publishers, customers, and collectives — each with customized dashboards and permissions. Track and album metadata management tools were built out so that rights holders could upload works, link them to albums, manage versions, set licensing parameters, and define distribution lists.
Automated pipelines were developed to ingest usage data from a variety of external sources and agent APIs, normalize and validate the data, then feed it into fee-calculation engines. These engines apply Lemoncake’s business rules to determine how much is owed to each stakeholder based on usage, split agreements, and other contractual terms. Invoices and statements are generated automatically as PDFs, scheduled or on demand, with formatting appropriate to each user’s role (composer, publisher, etc.).
The software also includes scheduling features to trigger recurring tasks: pulling usage data feeds, generating statements, notifying rights holders, closing accounting periods, etc. Additionally, Lemoncake’s customer-facing portal allows rights holders to log in, view usage reports, download statements and invoices, manage their catalogues, see upcoming scheduled payments, and configure preferences for data feeds or notifications. Under the hood, the system implements strong security: encrypted data storage and transit, role-based access controls, audit logs of key actions, validation of all external feed data, error handling and alerts. The development process followed agile workflows with regular feedback from composers, agents, publishers and other users to ensure the system matched actual needs.
The Impact
Since going live with the new system, Lemoncake has achieved significant improvements in efficiency, transparency, and user satisfaction. What used to be manual work — importing usage data, reconciling discrepancies, generating invoices and statements — is now largely automated, dramatically reducing the time from usage report receipt to payment distribution. Rights holders are seeing their statements and invoices earlier and with higher accuracy, which has increased trust and reduced queries.
Agents providing data via APIs or feeds observe that their integration into Lemoncake is more seamless, with fewer errors and less need for manual corrections. Composers, publishers, and collectives now benefit from clearer dashboards and up-to-date visibility into track usage, upcoming revenue, and catalogue status.
Internally, Lemoncake’s operational team has better oversight and control — with audit logs, role-based dashboards, and scheduled tasks ensuring that nothing is missed. The automated processes have reduced payroll or financial processing bottlenecks, while PDF generation and scheduled statements have eased administrative burdens significantly.
Financially, Lemoncake can forecast usage fees distribution more accurately, manage its liabilities and cash flow more reliably, and scale more effectively as new tracks, users, and data feeds are added. Furthermore, the strong security, data validation, and controlled access have enhanced compliance and reinforced stakeholder trust.