Kobalt Makes Music Publishing Easier with Stripe and AWS 

Kobalt was founded to disrupt the traditional music publishing industry by putting music creators first. While established artists often had access to favorable publishing deals, independent and mid-career songwriters struggled to find equitable opportunities. Complex contracts locked them into long-term commitments—and self-publishing was hardly any better, requiring songwriters to navigate royalties and licensing on their own, without the resources of larger publishers. 

“The deal process for artists at traditional legacy publishing companies was so complex and could take as long as two months,” said Ieuan Stanley, senior engineering manager at Kobalt. “You needed to be at a stage in your career where you had a support team around you that would help you understand what it was that you were committing to.” 

Kobalt sought a way to lower the barriers of entry that kept early- and mid-career songwriters out of traditional publishing deals, such as complicated contracts and long negotiation periods that held up royalty payments. By rethinking VIP quality publishing as a streamlined platform model, Kobalt aimed to give creators a faster, lower-risk path to professional royalties while extending the company’s proven expertise to a wider pool of talent. 

To address these challenges, Kobalt developed KOSIGN, a digital publishing platform that streamlines contracts and accelerates onboarding. What once took weeks or months of manual processes—involving contract negotiations, accounting set up, and song submissions—now takes days or even minutes on the platform. Best of all, creators maintain flexibility with no long-term commitments while accessing the same powerful royalty collection and distribution infrastructure used by Kobalt’s established artists. 

To build KOSIGN, the company partnered with Stripe, a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Stripe provided two critical capabilities: Stripe Identity, which helps securely verify songwriter identities, and Stripe Connect, which allows artists to submit and manage their own bank details for royalty payouts. These services addressed two of the biggest challenges in an automated pipeline: songwriter verification and compliant onboarding for publishers, as well as secure financial data handling to enable seamless royalty payouts. Both Stripe services gave Kobalt the confidence that rights holders were who they claimed to be and that payouts could be reliably distributed globally, without the added complexity of managing sensitive financial data in-house. In addition, Stripe Connect offers consolidated reporting across all involved parties, giving KOSIGN real-time visibility into transaction flows and simplifying financial reconciliation across its entire network
of artists.

And because Stripe runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Kobalt also benefitted from the global scale and reliability of AWS services. The KOSIGN onboarding flow was orchestrated through AWS Step Functions, which managed each step in sequence, from identity verification to payment setup. Custom business logic was run using AWS Lambda, while Amazon Cognito provided secure user authentication and Amazon DynamoDB delivered a fast, serverless database to store account and rights information. These services created a fully automated workflow that could scale globally while reducing the need for manual intervention. “The fact that we could both build KOSIGN through code, then visually see people stepping through the flow, has been really valuable,” said Stanley. “AWS Step Functions integrating easily with other AWS services and Stripe was probably the reason why we could get the onboarding flow automated so quickly.” With the automation of Stripe and the scale of AWS, Kobalt now gives songwriters a faster, more transparent path into publishing. 

Since launch, KOSIGN has transformed how songwriters engage with music publishing. “We’ve made the happy path into the happiest path,” said Stanley. “An artist can now sign up with KOSIGN and have songs registered in minutes.” Onboarding new clients now takes an average of seven days instead of 60, with artists able to register their first song within four minutes of joining the platform. In one case, a songwriter successfully registered more than 300 songs in a single session—that’s how easy the new system scales to meet creator demand. 

The results are not only faster but stickier. In its first six months, KOSIGN has achieved a nearly 100 percent retention rate, a level of engagement that’s especially notable given that artists can exit the platform at any time. This is underscored by feedback from creators. Songwriters have praised the ease of setup compared to other publishing platforms, along with the immediate feedback loop for registrations and faster royalty collection. Adoption of KOSIGN’s Spotify integration has also been strong. During onboarding, this feature suggests a songwriter’s existing songs directly from Spotify, eliminating the need for manual entry. Along with other platform improvements, this has contributed to first song registrations happening 50-90 percent faster than before. By combining simplicity and scale in partnership with Stripe and AWS, Kobalt keeps music publishing attuned for the creators it was built to serve.