Tonica

Overview

Tonica is a cloud-based royalty tracking and payout platform I'm building for independent musicians and small labels. The music industry has a money problem. Streaming revenue is fragmented across dozens of platforms, payments arrive months late, and most artists still rely on spreadsheets to figure out who gets paid what. Tonica replaces that entire workflow. Upload a royalty report and the system normalizes the data, calculates collaborator splits, generates transparent statements, and sends payouts.

The vision is to become the financial infrastructure layer for independent music. The place where raw streaming revenue turns into accurate, instantly distributable income with payment split (percentages) transparency so artists, producers, and collaboraters know their exact cut of profits.

The Problem

Royalties are slow, opaque, and painful to manage. Distributors typically pay 2-3 months after streams happen. Labels still send paper statements twice a year. A single song can generate mechanical, performance, and sync royalties across different systems, and modern tracks often have five or more contributors who each need correct splits. Small teams end up buried in CSV exports and manual PayPal transfers that break the moment they try to scale. Additionally, current services that globalize payments across different softwares and distributors are exclusive to larger more-developed artists, leaving growing artists with more blockades between them and success.

How It Works

The process is simple. Upload report, auto-split, generate statement, send payouts. Under the hood, an ETL pipeline ingests royalty CSVs (with API integrations from DSP's too), normalizes inconsistent formats into a common schema using ISRC codes for reliable track matching, and applies pre-configured split rules per track. Every calculation, statement, and transaction is logged permanently, creating an audit trail that becomes the source of truth for everyone involved.

Technical Details

The frontend is React on Azure Static Web Apps, backend logic runs on Azure Functions, and data lives in PostgreSQL DB. File uploads go through Blob Storage with event-driven triggers that kick off the ETL pipeline. Payout integration starts with PayPal's batch API, with Stripe Connect for direct bank deposits.

future plans

Currently building this idea out, adapting to integrating AI to help upcoming music artists navigate software, looking for co-founders, using customer surveys from music forums and direct contacts to change software and services as needed, narrowing down launching market size. Reach out if you want to discuss anything music + technology related. My end goal is really just helping out music artists in any way possible.