Three other organizations owe you money for the same songs. None of them pay anything until somebody registers you. For most independent artists, nobody has.
Send me one statement →You get a 3-minute video back. No call. No pitch.
If there's nothing worth fixing, I'll say so.
The thing nobody explains
Every piece of music is two things at once — the recording and the song. A single stream owes money on both, and those payments go to different places.
The recording. TuneCore, DistroKid, CD Baby. This is the statement you already see.
Mechanical royalties on the song. Spotify pays the MLC directly. It never touches your distributor.
Performance royalties on the song. ASCAP, BMI, SESAC. Being a member is not the same as registering each song.
Digital radio — Pandora, SiriusXM. Paid straight to the performer, not through a label or distributor. Unclaimed money expires after three years.
What actually happens
Two halves. The first I do on my own before we talk. The second we do together, on a screen share, in about twenty minutes.
You do these four yourself with me on screen. Your logins stay yours — and those databases don't permit a third party to look them up and resell the answer.
A real teardown
Four findings from one real distributor export, redacted. None of these are visible by reading the statement normally — and none of them are guesses about what you're owed. They're facts about what the document does and doesn't say.
[[Swap one of these for a redacted client finding with a dollar figure in it, as soon as you have permission — a client's $1,340 beats any of the above]]
[[LEAVE THIS SECTION OUT until you have real ones. Do not write a placeholder quote and forget to remove it, and never invent one — fabricated testimonials carry FTC civil penalties, and in this market getting caught ends the business.]]
[[How to get three fast: at the end of each free session ask — "if this was useful, can you give me one sentence I can put on a page?" Ask for a number in it. "Found two months missing and got me registered with the MLC in 40 minutes — Name, artist/manager" is worth ten of "great to work with."]]
The session
Where every dollar came from, which platforms actually pay you, and where your listeners really are. Most people have never had this explained to them once.
Missing months, platforms that never paid, and exactly how many streams each track needs to start earning. I'll also tell you plainly what's fine, because usually most of it is.
MLC, PRO, SoundExchange. You type your own credentials, I walk you through every field. All three are free to join.
Before you ask
You never give me a password. At the MLC you add me as a Copyright User on your own account and remove me whenever you like. Everywhere else you type your own credentials while I talk you through the fields.
The money never passes through me. Every royalty is paid directly to you by the MLC, your PRO and SoundExchange. I never hold it, route it, or take a percentage of it. There's no mechanism for me to skim anything, because I'm never in the middle.
Your statement is deleted after 30 days unless you ask me to keep it, and it's never shared with anyone. Prefer not to send a file at all? We'll do the whole thing on a screen share and it never leaves your computer.
Who I am
[[City]]
[[Replace the initials circle with a real photo of your face. On a page like this it does more work than any other single element.]]
[[Two or three sentences in your own words: your music background, and what made you start reading royalty statements closely. Lead with the work, not with your own earnings — "I built a tool that reads distributor statements and started finding reporting gaps in them" is the right register for a manager. Save the "I found a month missing in my own TuneCore" story for peer artists, where it makes their numbers feel safe. In front of someone managing a roster it undercuts you.]]
What I'm not: not a lawyer, not an accountant, and not affiliated with the MLC, any PRO, or SoundExchange. I read statements and fill in registrations correctly. Anything touching a contract dispute or your taxes needs a professional, and I'll tell you that rather than guess.
Straight answers
Nothing right now. I'm running these free while I test the process on real statements — I need the cases more than you need to pay me. I'll charge eventually, and if you're one of the early ones I'll tell you before that ever applies to you.
You can, and if you'd rather, go do it — start at the MLC portal and your PRO's site. All three are free to join and the MLC even publishes a free course on it.
What you'd be getting from me is that it takes most people a confused afternoon and a couple of wrong entries, versus forty-five minutes with someone who's done it repeatedly — plus a read on the statement you can't interpret yet.
Reasonable question. Here's structure instead of a promise: no percentage, no contract, nothing recurring, and I'm never between you and your money. Every royalty flows directly from the MLC, your PRO and SoundExchange into your account. And right now I'm not charging anything, so there's nothing to take.
No. Those are publishing administrators — they collect for you and take 15–20% of your publishing for as long as it earns. This is a one-time setup, registered in your own name, with no cut.
They also don't cover SoundExchange — Songtrust and TuneCore Publishing both say so explicitly. That's the master side, a separate pipe. And a warning nobody volunteers: if you're on CD Baby Pro or CDB Boost, you generally can't also use Songtrust.
If what you want is someone collecting across dozens of foreign societies on your behalf, an administrator is genuinely the better choice, and I'll say so.
Almost certainly not. Business managers do accounting — bookkeeping, taxes, bill-pay, reconciling statements. Registering works at the MLC and your PRO is rights administration, a different job entirely.
So the business manager assumes the publisher handles it, the publisher assumes the manager does, and the works sit unregistered. This happens at every level — recovery firms have pulled six figures out of catalogs belonging to artists with full teams.
Registration is fast. Money is slow. Expect your first meaningful payments six to twelve months out, then quarterly. Some MLC money can be claimed retroactively, but most of the value is forward-looking.
I'd rather put that on this page than surprise you later. Anyone promising a quick check is selling you something else.
Then I tell you that, and we're done. That's what the free teardown is for.
At very small catalogs the honest answer is often "your setup is broken but the money isn't material yet" — which is still worth knowing, because fixing it now is free and fixing it after a song takes off is not.
One file: your distributor's sales or transactions export, CSV or Excel. No logins, no passwords, no bank details, and no access to your distributor account.
Send one artist's most recent distributor statement. You'll get a short video back showing what I found and roughly what it's worth.
Email me a statement →Or book the 45-minute session — also free right now.
[[Replace the mailto address and the booking link. Cal.com is free for individuals and can take payment at the moment of booking later, when you start charging.]]