Nobody would accept this
in any other industry.
Splitkeep began with an uncomfortable question. If any other business handled other people’s money the way music does, would anyone put up with it for a week?
The part everyone has quietly agreed to live with
A songwriter can be owed money for years with no way to check. A producer’s claim on a record can live in a text thread. A split can be changed by whoever happens to hold the account. A statement arrives as a single number, and the only way to question it is to ask the person who sent it.
Almost none of this is fraud. Most of it is what happens when the record of who agreed to what was never really built to be a record. It was a spreadsheet, an email, a memory, a setting in someone else’s software. The music industry runs on relationships, and relationships are exactly the thing that nobody wrote down.
It takes both kinds of experience, and most attempts have one
Splitkeep is built by a security engineer who has spent fifteen years on a short list of unglamorous questions — who is allowed to do this, how do we prove they did it, what happens when the permission has to come back — across some of the most demanding, high-stakes environments in technology, the kind where “we’ll sort it out later” is not an answer. Music asks those exact questions about people’s work and their money, and almost never answers them.
These are the questions any serious system asks when it is holding something people cannot afford to lose. In music they have mostly gone unasked — not out of bad intent, but because the record of who agreed to what was never built to be a record. The cost of that lands on the people with the least leverage to complain.
The other half of the problem you cannot get from a database, so I went to the people who live it. Splitkeep was shaped in direct consultation with industry veterans across the artist, producer, management, and label world — people who have spent careers in the rooms where these decisions actually get made. They named the conversation that stalls a release, the line on a statement that starts the argument, and the elegant fix that would never survive a Tuesday. Splitkeep was built against what they told me, not around a whiteboard.
Security people alone build something rigorous nobody wants. Music people alone rebuild the same problem with a better interface.
So the rights record is built the way you would build a security system, and every decision inside it was argued against how the business really runs. Permissions enforced in the database rather than implied in the interface. Terms countersigned by every participant and immutable once accepted. Shares that stay held rather than quietly returning to whoever uploaded the file. An append-only history. Revocation that actually revokes. And every figure on every statement traceable to the source report, the fee math, and the terms version behind it.
But a system nobody wants to open protects no one. So Splitkeep is built to feel like it is on your side: plain where the industry is opaque, human where it matters, and designed around the person rather than the paperwork. The rigor is the backbone. Being understandable — and yours — is the point.
What we will not do, written down
Any platform can promise to behave while it is small. These are the ones we expect to be held to when we are not.
We will not train AI on your work
Not on your recordings, your agreements, your splits, or your relationships — and we will never quietly farm your data to build a model. Training is the one operation revocation cannot undo, and our whole model rests on revocation being real. Your record carries an explicit, signed, machine-readable do-not-train preference that travels with it; we honor it here, and state it clearly wherever the record goes.
We will not make your catalog hard to leave
Full export of your works, terms, evidence, and statements in one click, on your own initiative, with no retention call and no exit fee.
We will not claim a rail is live when it is not
We will tell you exactly what is running and what is still being built, including when the honest answer is inconvenient for us.
We will not decide who owns what
People and their agreements establish rights. We record and enforce what they agreed, and we will never dress that up as a legal conclusion about copyright.
Who is building it
Fifteen years securing systems people cannot afford to have fail, across many of the most demanding environments in tech — now turning that discipline on an industry that handles other people’s money with less rigor than a login form. He owns the architecture, the security model, the design, and the build, and writes and reviews the code the platform runs on.
The work has been shaped in close consultation with veterans across the artist, management, and label world, and that guidance continues. The founding team is being built with the same care as the product — we would rather introduce the right people properly, when they are formally on board, than list titles to fill a page, and we will name our advisors when it is right to.
Where we actually are
Working now: the governed record. Splits, permissions, evidence, the ledger, statements, and roster views, running in controlled evaluation on synthetic data.
Connecting next: distribution delivery, royalty report ingestion, and payouts through licensed payment partners — those connections are being activated. We are incorporated, pre-revenue, and have taken no outside capital. When any of that changes, this paragraph changes with it.