Photographers usually are so busy lining up their next shoot that it’s tough for them to find time to deal with another aspect of their business: distributing royalties.

LicenseStream removes a lot of the pain of collecting royalties for the principal content creator or owner, since its automated licensing service typically accepts payment upfront.   It goes a step further by providing a service to distribute royalties directly to anyone collaborating on a LicenseStream user’s image or project.

For example, say you regularly rely on help from a food stylist and a lighting assistant to shoot a mouth-watering image of a glistening steak for a magazine cover. You want to keep your assistants happy by ensuring they get their share of payments for each assignment on a timely basis. However, you may not have enough time between tightly-scheduled shoots to calculate and send checks manually to all of your helpers.

With LicenseStream you can easily set up royalty profiles for each of your assistants so they receive their royalty splits automatically via mailed check. Simply log into your LicenseStream account, go to the Business/Store Manager and click on the Manage Royalty Profile in the lower right-hand box.

Then: 

• Go to Options & Tools in the right margin, click on Add/Edit Royalty Profile and the bar will open up and prompt you to provide a Royalty Profile name. Provide a name and click to Add Royalty Profile.
• Click on the Royalty Recipient tab. The Royalty Recipient tab will open up and prompt you to add the name, city, state, country and zip code of a royalty recipient. In the example below, we’ve named her Mary Lightbright, a name which then appears on a list on the right side of the page under Edit Content Provider Share.  We then added a couple of other fictional characters (John Ham the food stylist and  Imogen Maker the videomaker)
• Type in the royalty share for each recipient – 10% each for Mary, John and Imogen. Click Save Royalty Profile and – voila – you’re done!

There are 3 areas where you can apply the Royalty Profile you just created to one or multiple content items:

• After uploading an image.
• On the Prepare Content page, where you may select one or multiple items.
• Under the License & Royalty Information area, where you may select the appropriate Royalty Profile, add/update other metadata and then click Prepare Content on the bottom of the page.

To apply an existing Royalty Profile to an existing single image or other piece of content:

• Click on the Manage Content tab at the top.
• Locate the image you want to associate with this royalty split.  Mouse over the image and click on the Edit tab.
• On the Edit Content page, click on Licensing and scroll to the bottom of the page to Manage Content Splits.
• Under Manage Splits, click to Add Imogen, John and Mary to the Manage Content Splits side of the page and assign them 10% each.

To apply an existing royalty profile to multiple existing pieces of content:

• Click on the Manage Content tab at the top.
• Select the content to which you'd like to apply the Royalty Profile.
• Under the Actions area, select Add Selected to > Batch Content Editor.
• Under the License & Royalty Information area, select the appropriate Royalty Profile.
• Click to Save Information on the bottom of the page.

Alternatively, you may define and apply an entirely new set of recipients and percentages for the next shoot.

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