About
An outlet with no access to protect.
RapCanon is an independent music-intelligence publication. We do first-party research on how the music business actually works and publish the underlying data openly, because the arithmetic is the part everyone else leaves out.
Who writes this
The research is authored, not anonymous
RapCanon is founded and edited by Vincent Wesley Couey, who also runs the Substrate Geometry Research Program and hekhal.org, and operates a portfolio of independent web properties under deepsynthesis.org. Contact: vinnycouey@gmail.com.
That connection is stated here on purpose. A publication whose whole argument is that undisclosed commercial interest distorts coverage cannot itself be quiet about who owns it. So: one person runs this and other things, none of those other things sell distribution, promotion, playlists or catalogue services, and none of them has any position on the questions this site answers.
ORCID: 0009-0005-6869-308X, a persistent researcher identifier, so the person behind this is verifiable rather than asserted.
The research record is in chemistry and physics rather than music, and that is stated plainly: it establishes that a real, credentialed person publishes with methods and data, not that we are a musicologist. The music work stands or falls on its own stated methods.
CLERK, the culture desk
News and litigation coverage runs under the byline CLERK. CLERK is a pen name, not a person, it is the desk that reads court filings, catalogue sales, registrations and estate records, and it exists so that side of the site can use a plainer, faster voice without borrowing the research byline's credentials.
A pen name over a publisher who is named is ordinary. A pen name over a publisher who is hidden is the thing this site argues against, so we will not do the second one: everything CLERK publishes is edited and owned by the person named above.
CLERK works from primary documents. Allegations in a filed complaint are labelled as allegations, the unheard side is named as unheard, and what we do not know gets its own line. Corrections are dated and the original stays visible.
Funding
How this is paid for
Primarily by selling our own software. The same person who runs this site builds audio tools for producers and artists, and those are sold here openly and labelled as ours. That is a deliberate choice over advertising, and the reasoning is worth stating plainly.
This publication exists because most answers to money-in-music questions come from companies with a product riding on the answer, distributors pricing distribution, promoters explaining growth, merchandise companies explaining streaming income. A plugin has no position on what a stream pays, who owns a master, or how a credit is registered. It is an unrelated product sold to an overlapping audience, which is a different thing entirely from selling the answer.
The rules we hold ourselves to, and you can hold us to them: our own products are never reviewed, ranked, benchmarked or compared here. They never appear inside a tool result or any ranking. They are always labelled as ours rather than presented as a recommendation. And they never appear on a piece where their category is the subject.
There is no sponsorship and no affiliate revenue on this site yet. When there is, it sits beside the work and never inside a ranking, it is labelled on the unit, and the full terms are published at /disclosure/. No investor, label, distributor or platform has editorial input, and no commercial party sees a study before it publishes.
Ranking positions are not for sale, at any price. That is not a courtesy, it is the product: an index anyone can buy into measures nothing, and would be worth nothing to the readers who use it to make decisions.
Reach us
- Data and documents: statements, contracts, settlements. Sources are handled properly and we state what we can and cannot verify.
- Corrections: if we published a wrong number, tell us and we will date the correction and leave the original visible.
- Commercial: position in a ranking is never for sale. Paid placement sits beside the work, labelled on the unit, on the terms published at /disclosure/.
A contact address publishes with the author entity, so that a real person receives it rather than a form that goes nowhere.