Networks
Who works with whom, and who only appears to.
Two networks, and they disagree. One is who appears on records together. The other is who writes together. One is performance, the other is production, and the gap between them is the part nobody shows.
as_of 2026-08-11 · updated as each installment publishes · a dash means no published figure, not zero
Why two graphs
Who appears together
Derived from release metadata. This is the network everyone can already see, and it is the one that gets talked about.
Who writes together
Derived from registration data. This is the network that actually made the records, and it is not the same shape.
An artist with a large feature network and a small writing network is a different creature from one with the inverse. Each piece on this beat makes one falsifiable call and a later installment revisits it, because a prediction nobody scores is entertainment.
Nothing published yet.
Where these findings come from
The collection network is the map, and it is public
The direct answer: the organisations that route music money are documented, and which one pays which stream is knowable rather than mysterious. Most of what artists experience as money going missing is a routing problem between named bodies, not a theft.
The routing splits cleanly once the map is drawn. Performance royalties for the composition move through the performing rights organisations, ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, and BMI publishes how its own distributions are calculated. US mechanical royalties from streaming move through the MLC under the blanket licence the Music Modernization Act created. Non-interactive performance of the recording is a different body again, SoundExchange, and internationally the societies coordinate through CISAC. The publisher side is represented by the NMPA.
The trap this hub exists for: being registered with one of these does not register anyone with the others, and a distributor is not a substitute for any of them. Those are separate memberships with separate registrations, and the money each collects is not collected by the rest. The Copyright Office FAQ is a starting point for the statutory half; the rest has to be checked body by body.
The rules this desk works under
- Each body gets named, never the industry. The whole failure mode here is an artist not knowing which organisation is holding their money.
- Coverage claims get sourced to the body's own documentation, because what a company collects changes, and a stale answer costs a reader money.
- Where a body has not published an answer, this hub says so rather than inferring one from a competitor.
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.