Economics
What the money actually does.
Per-stream payouts, advances, recoupment, deal structures and tour settlements, worked through with the arithmetic shown. Every figure carries its source and its assumptions, because a number without its method is an opinion with a decimal point.
as_of 2026-08-11 · updated as each installment publishes · a dash means no published figure, not zero
Start here
Recoupment calculator
Enter an advance, a rate and the recoupable costs, and see the revenue required before an artist earns anything beyond money they already had.
Recoupment, explained in full
Why a successful record can still leave the artist owing money, with the arithmetic and what is commonly confused with it.
Black box royalties
Money collected, never matched to whoever earned it, then distributed by market share to the largest rights holders.
Why every published per-stream figure disagrees
Not another estimate. The piece that explains the pool-share model and states its own uncertainty.
Free, and actually useful
The registration checklist that keeps your royalties out of the black box
Most unmatched royalties are a registration problem, and registration is the part an artist controls without a lawyer. This is the checklist: every place a work has to be registered, every field that causes a mismatch, and the order to do it in.
No list exists yet. It opens with the first study, and the checklist goes out to everyone waiting on day one.