Greenlight Music: Rights Holder Clearance Tool
If you are familiar with the entertainment industry you know one of the most time consuming and difficult processes is procuring the rights for music. There are often many rights holders who are difficult to track down or who can be really difficult to negotiate with. Our hope with the Greenlight Music project was to help streamline the industry and make it as painless as possible and this tool was a big part of that.
The dashboard was the stepping off point for all interactions as well as high-level statistics and historical data. Greenlight Music’s core focus was clearing small scale low cost clearance with little overhead so we wanted to keep
Selecting a stat from the graph would provide some additional detail. For v1 we really didn’t want to get too far into the weeds with analysis as we really just wanted to test an MVP and adjust our strategy from there.
This page was really the core of the tool. Upon receiving an initial offer the rights holder would access it allowing them to accept the current offer, suggest a counter offer, or decline the offer outright. If any rights holder declined the offer outright it would be suspended and a broker would contact the declining party offline.
The counter offer was the most expected result and as it had tested well we utilized the same functionality as the customers initial offer form. In most cases multiple rights holders existed so the highest counter offer would be the one provided to the customer.
Once the counter offer was submitted the rights holder could check back to see any status changes until the customer approved or sent a final counter offer. In addition they would be able to see any updates to the counter offer from other rights holders and subsequent revenue updates.
If the customer negotiated past the initial counter offer the license would reach a final offer. The rights holder at this point could chose to accept or decline the offer to prevent to much back and forth. If declining they are required to select a reason which would be used to follow up offline.
If the rights holder approves the final counteroffer the license would still remain in a pending state until all rights holders approved the license.
Additional Thoughts
This project was one of my earliest projects as a user experience designer. At the time I didn’t have much experience with workflows or dashboards and in some ways I think it showed. Looking at it now it there are definitely some things I would do differently but on the other hand there were some successful parts too. For instance, I think keeping the workflow as simple and linear as possible was a good thing but I didn’t represent that workflow anywhere and I think that was a big miss especially for first time users. In any case, I still remember learning a ton from the project and my teammates and that’s never a bad thing.