Stage: Engineering platform infrastructure for music rights and contributor recognition

The Client

Stage is a technology company building digital tools for the music industry, with a focus on ensuring every contributor to a piece of music receives both the credit and the payment they are owed. 

Their platform, Session, was founded by Swedish songwriter and producer Nicolas Molinder and is backed by Björn Ulvaeus and songwriter Max Martin. It provides a collaborative environment for song production with built-in credit management for producers, songwriters and musicians, permanently tagging contributors to every piece of music they help create. 

Stage also works alongside the largest collective rights management organisation in the music industry, supporting the international collection of royalties whenever music is played.

The Challenge

Music rights have always been difficult to allocate equitably. Even organisations with established technology solutions have struggled to keep pace with streaming platforms and the fundamental changes they have brought to how music is distributed and consumed. 

For Stage, the engineering challenges were specific: 

• Building and scaling a complex ecosystem of digital tools quickly and without compromise to quality or reliability. 
• Finding an engineering partner with both the capability to move at pace and the technical depth to sustain a long-term collaboration. 
• Establishing a working model that functioned not just in the short term, but as a durable foundation for an ongoing partnership. 
• Ensuring contributors worldwide could trust the platform to recognise and reward their work accurately and consistently. 

The Solution

Before any development began, TXP and Stage invested time in getting the foundations right. Both teams worked closely to understand each other’s strengths, map the technical environment and define a collaboration model built for the long term. That upfront investment shaped the quality and pace of everything that followed. 

TXP engineers became embedded, trusted members of the Stage team, developing a deep understanding of the platform’s infrastructure, architecture and strategic direction across multiple concurrent projects. 

The partnership has delivered across the full breadth of Stage’s engineering needs: 

• Rapidly scaling delivery capability, with engineers onboarded significantly faster than traditional hiring would allow. 
• Building out the Session platform, enabling permanent, reliable credit attribution for every contributor to a piece of music. 
• Supporting royalty collection infrastructure in collaboration with the world’s largest collective rights management organisation. 
• Bringing proactive problem-solving into the team, with engineers identifying improvements independently rather than solely executing against a defined brief. 

The Benefits

“TXP people are problem-solvers. They’re engaged, motivated and proactive and they instinctively hunt for better ways to achieve results. They don’t necessarily have to be specifically tasked with something, they regularly come up with ideas independently. This attitude is invaluable for us.” — Dominic Blatchford, CTO, Stage 

• Delivery capability scaled rapidly, without the overhead and lead times of traditional recruitment. 
• The Session platform now enables contributors around the world to receive accurate credit attribution and royalty payment for their work. 
• Royalty collection infrastructure built and supported in collaboration with the industry’s leading rights management organisation. 
• A collaboration model established from the outset for the long term, with TXP engineers contributing to platform strategy and improvement as well as delivery.