Guides
CWR from Curve
Curve (Curve Royalty Systems) is the modern cloud platform for music royalty accounting — labels, publishers, and distributors run statements through it — and its publishing management system handles works, cascading chains of interested parties, and society registrations, with CWR 2.1 and 2.2 delivery built in. We’ve worked with it directly: we’ve exported catalog data from Curve and delivered society-ready CWR built from it.
What Curve does well
Curve applies CISAC’s work validations to every work before a delivery and structures its files cleanly — controlled and uncontrolled writers and publishers, territories, recordings, and alternate titles all carry through. For a catalog that lives in Curve, CWR is a first-class export, not an afterthought.
Two quirks worth knowing before you deliver
- Works that fail validation are left out of the file. Curve only includes works that pass its checks — which keeps files clean, but means a delivery can quietly contain fewer works than your catalog. If nobody counts, nobody notices the missing songs until the royalties don’t arrive. Our report states the exact number of works in the file, so you can check it against what you meant to send.
- Exports use REV lines exclusively, even for works a society has never seen. Most societies accept a REV for an unknown work as a new registration; a few are stricter about NWR versus REV. Worth knowing when a society’s response looks odd.
Also note Curve’s own documented limits: non-ASCII characters (and instrumentation records for classical/scoring catalogs) aren’t supported in its CWR output — relevant if your titles or writers need them.
Verify the delivery, not the catalog
The file that leaves Curve is what the society judges. Drop it on the validator — free, nothing stored — and you get a plain-language verdict, every finding tied to its exact line and song, the total work count, and a to-do list. Two minutes before delivery beats three weeks after.
Want it handled end to end?
We’ve exported catalogs from Curve and run the registrations — delivery, acknowledgement chasing, corrections, every society. If that sounds better than doing it in-house, tell us about your catalog.
Two free checks for your CWR file. Is the file correct? Every record, share and control total against the spec, each problem on its exact line. Do its writers match their registrations? Every writer cross-checked against public registration data, including works registered under another spelling or IPI. Nothing stored: check a file at cwrcheck.com.