Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

One problem that has come with E-Commerce’s love affair with multimedia is tracking royalties. Even assuming that all electronic storefronts are honestly and completely reporting music and video revenue, the huge array of different formats and specs make the process difficult at best for content creators. With multimedia sales now becoming a key part of the mobile experience, the data-incompatibility issues are likely to grow.

In this industry, though, wherever there’s a problem, there’s someone around trying to make money off of the problem and perhaps whittle the problem down in the process. A vendor called RoyaltyShare next week will launch a service for aggregating and monitoring digital sales data and will also announce deals with a few mid-sized independent record labels. The company is run by Bob Kohn, who had co-founded the eMusic music download site and had also been a vice chairman of Borland Software. Product details were scarce, other than it being Web-based and that it is tweaked to grab sales data sites including iTunes, Napster, eMusic and Rhapsody.