Estimate what your streams should be paying you across every royalty type — and how much is likely slipping past you because publishing, mechanical and neighboring rights are never claimed. Move the slider, pick the kind of distributor you use today, and compare the yearly cost.
The money difference
Most distributors charge more than a plan fee: upload fees per release, a slice of your streaming income, and a slice of your publishing, YouTube and sync collections. Add it up for a year and compare.
Singles, EPs or albums uploaded this year.
These are anonymized pricing archetypes, not any specific company's terms. Per-stream payouts are blended industry averages and vary by service, territory and listener plan.
What you actually pay per year
Plus: royalties nobody is claiming for you
A conservative estimate of publishing, mechanical and neighboring rights income generated by 1,800,000 annual streams that goes unclaimed when nobody administers those rights. That is income to recover — separate from the fees above.
Included at no extra cost here
Commonly sold a-la-carte or bundled into a higher tier elsewhere.
It estimates recording (master) revenue from your monthly streams, plus the publishing, mechanical and neighboring rights income that often goes uncollected when nobody administers those rights for you.
A revenue share scales with your success: every new stream pays the distributor again. A flat annual fee stays the same whether you do 10,000 streams a month or 5,000,000, so the gap widens every year your catalog grows. The same applies to publishing and sync administration cuts, which are taken off the top of everything collected on your behalf.
There is no per-release upload fee, no percentage cut of your streaming royalties, and no administration cut of your publishing, YouTube or sync income. ISRC and UPC codes, split payments to collaborators, AI metadata validation, the rights completion score and a sync marketplace listing are included in the flat annual plan rather than sold a-la-carte.
The calculator uses blended industry averages across major streaming services. Real payouts vary by service, territory, listener plan and your agreements, so treat the output as a planning estimate rather than a statement of earnings.
No. They are anonymized pricing archetypes — an annual fee with per-release charges, a higher unlimited tier, a revenue-share model, and a free tier with a large publishing cut. Each rate sits inside the ranges publicly documented across the independent distribution market, but no figure represents any single company's terms.
You need registrations and an administrator for the publishing side, and neighboring rights collection for the recording side. Artist Aligned surfaces the gaps and handles the registrations alongside distribution.