Thirty years in music.
Fifteen of them building.
melino was a record label before it was software, which is why the software is shaped the way it is. What follows is the whole of it, in the order it happened.
Early 1990s
Early 1990s
A name on a dance record
melino was Sebastian Wolter's pseudonym for a dance project before it was a company, a platform or a payroll. The name is about twenty years older than the software it now belongs to.
The years after
The years after
A production company, then a label
The project became a music production company and then a record label of its own, with international releases and records made alongside established labels worldwide. Everything melino later built, it first needed.
2011
2011
One platform instead of a shelf of tools
Running a label from the inside made the pattern plain, and it is the observation this company is built on: administrative overhead scales faster than a catalogue does, so below a certain size the admin eats the work. Development started on a system to bring every label operation into one place — the melino Platform.
A year later
A year later
Label management, from one accountable partner
The platform went to market as a model rather than as a licence: full label management. Instead of assembling individual services from half a dozen suppliers and holding the seams together, a label could hand over the operational backbone whole and hold one company to the dates.
2013
2013
The parts, sold separately
The portfolio opened up in both directions. Royalty accounting and the rest of the back office became services you could take on their own, and the melino Platform became software you could licence and run yourself.
2021
2021
Artists get a login of their own
The Artist Portal gave every artist on a melino label their own view of the business: their catalogue, their statements in full line-level detail and their payouts, with their payment and tax details kept by them rather than chased by email. It came with every plan, at no extra cost.
2023
2023
Publishing, on the same platform
melino Publishing brought copyright administration onto the platform the labels already ran on: works and their splits, registration with the societies over CWR, and statements accounted back out to writers. Publishers got the back office labels had had for a decade.
2024
2024
The portal, in their pocket
The Artist Portal arrived on iOS and Android, so the statement an artist waits for is on the phone they already check, not behind a laptop login they forget. Push notifications closed the loop between label and artist: a new statement, a payout or a message from the label reaches the artist the moment it is sent, instead of waiting in an inbox.
2025
2025
Suppliers maintain their own records
The Supplier Portal opened the catalogue to the labels, producers and distributors who deliver into it. They keep their own recordings and releases up to date and hand them over as delivery-ready metadata, rather than sending changes in for someone else to type.
2026
2026
Twenty-five people, a hundred-odd companies
melino is a team of 25 working, running the platform and the back office behind more than 100 music companies around the world — labels and publishers, from catalogues of a few hundred recordings to catalogues nobody counts by hand.
