---
title: Breakage: the platform money your catalogue cannot claim
publisher: RapCanon
canonical: https://rapcanon.com/glossary/breakage/
license: CC-BY-4.0
retrieved: 2026-08-12
---

> Breakage is money a label receives from a digital service that is not attributable to any specific artist's usage, such as advances, minimum guarantees and equity.

Glossary · Economics

 
# Breakage

 
also filed under: unattributed income, digital breakage

 
 

 
 Breakage is money a label receives from a digital service that is not attributable to any specific artist's usage, such as advances, minimum guarantees and equity. 

 
## The mechanism

 
Platform deals often include payments that do not correspond to plays: an upfront advance against future royalties, a guaranteed minimum whether or not usage justifies it, or shares in the service itself. Because these are not tied to any particular recording, there is no automatic mechanism that routes a portion to the artists whose catalogue made the deal worth doing.

 
## A worked example

 A service pays a large minimum guarantee for catalogue access. Usage in the period falls short of that minimum. The surplus arrives at the label with no per-track attribution attached to it. 

 Money the platform paid for your catalogue that your catalogue cannot claim. 

 
## What it is confused with

 - Black box royalties Black box money is attributable in principle but unmatched in practice. Breakage is structurally unattributable, because it was never generated by identifiable usage.
- Physical breakage The term originally covered a deduction for records broken in shipping. That deduction survived into contracts long after the physical justification disappeared, which is why the word carries two meanings.
 

 
## Why it matters

 
Whether an artist sees any of it depends entirely on a contract clause, and most agreements are silent, which resolves in favour of the party holding the money.

 
Sources: US Copyright Office
 This entry is part of an open dataset published under CC-BY 4.0. Reuse it, including commercially, with attribution.
 Related: Recoupment · Black box royalties · 360 deal

---

## How to cite this page

**APA**
RapCanon. (2026). Breakage: the platform money your catalogue cannot claim. Retrieved from https://rapcanon.com/glossary/breakage/

**BibTeX**
```bibtex
@misc{rapcanon-glossary-breakage,
  title  = {Breakage: the platform money your catalogue cannot claim},
  author = {{RapCanon}},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://rapcanon.com/glossary/breakage/},
  note   = {Accessed: 2026-08-12}
}
```

**Wikipedia**
```
{{cite web |title=Breakage: the platform money your catalogue cannot claim |url=https://rapcanon.com/glossary/breakage/ |publisher=RapCanon |access-date=2026-08-12}}
```

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Canonical HTML: https://rapcanon.com/glossary/breakage/