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.
Where these numbers come from
Nobody sets a per-stream rate, which is why one cannot be quoted
The direct answer: there is no per-stream rate to look up, because a stream generates several different payments under different rules to different parties, and only one of them is negotiated per deal. Anyone quoting a single number is quoting an average of their own catalogue, not a rate.
The part that genuinely is fixed is the statutory side. The Copyright Royalty Board, a body of three federal judges, sets the mechanical rate for interactive streaming by rulemaking and publishes the determined rates directly. Those rates flow through the blanket licence the Music Modernization Act created, administered by the MLC, and the Copyright Office keeps a plain-language FAQ on how that licence works. The recording side is the opposite: it is negotiated privately between each service and each rights holder, which is exactly why it cannot be published.
For pool figures this desk uses the disclosures the payers themselves publish, and names them every time: Spotify's Loud and Clear for its own payout totals and distribution, its published definition of a countable stream, and its own royalties explainer for the mechanism. Industry totals come from IFPI and the RIAA. Every one of those is an interested party, which is stated rather than hidden: they are the best available primary numbers and they are also marketing.
The rules this desk works under
- A rate and an average are different objects. A quoted per-stream figure is an average of an outcome, and this desk labels which one it is publishing every time.
- Payer-published figures get named as payer-published. They are the best data available and they are produced by a party with an interest in the conclusion.
- Statutory and negotiated stay separated. Mixing the CRB-set mechanical with the privately negotiated master rate is how an invented number becomes a citable one.
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.