Where every number comes from.

01What Recoup measures (and what it doesn't)

Recoup focuses on what your record contract actually says, and what your music is reasonably earning right now from streaming and radio.

02Confidence labels

Every number in Recoup carries one of three labels. The label tells you how directly we measured it.

03The 7-tier internal taxonomy

Internally we track seven provenance tiers. Each tier maps to one of the three user-facing labels above.

The rollup rule for any aggregated number is “worst label wins” — if one ingredient is modeled, the total reads as modeled.

04Per-country rate quality — 35 markets

Recoup ships per-country rates for 35 markets across 6 streaming platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, YouTube Music, Amazon, Deezer). Each market carries a confidence tag indicating how tightly its rate is triangulated against public sources.

Streaming data is “tracked” across every market here (Soundcharts). Radio is modeled at V1; native radio connectors land in a follow-up.

05The 5-layer rate model

A single “per-stream rate” doesn't exist. What you actually earn from one play depends on five separate factors, each modeled explicitly:

1. Layer 1 · Platform

   Spotify, Apple, Tidal, YouTube Music, Amazon, and Deezer all pay different rates per stream. Apple typically pays ~1.6× Spotify; Tidal HiFi ~3×; YouTube Music ~0.4×. Each platform has its own column in our rate table.

2. Layer 2 · Country

   The same platform pays differently per listener country. Spotify in Norway pays ~6× what it pays in India. We sum contributions per country rather than averaging across them.

3. Layer 3 · Pool deductions

   Spotify pools subscription revenue and pays out pro-rata. Deezer uses ACPS (user-centric, paid only when subscribers actually played you). Our rates are net of typical pool deductions for each platform.

4. Layer 4 · Publishing share + perf/mech split

   Roughly 15% of every stream's gross goes to writers (CISAC/BIEM convention). That 15% slice splits between performance (radio-play side) and mechanical (sheet-music side) — and the split is country-specific: Norway 70/30, Germany 33/67, UK 50/50, Netherlands 75/25. Recoup's projection respects this per-country split instead of using one global ratio.

5. Layer 5 · Contract reductions

   Some contracts further reduce mechanical income — most notably the US Controlled Composition Clause (major-label US deals cut mech by 25–50%). When the contract reader detects this clause, the mechanical line in your projection drops accordingly. Performance and master are unaffected.

Norway (70/30 perf/mech split)
  Gross from 1,000 streams ≈ $4.30
  → Writer slice (15%) ≈ $0.65
  → Performance (70%) ≈ $0.45
  → Mechanical (30%) ≈ $0.20

Germany (33/67 perf/mech split)
  Gross from 1,000 streams ≈ $4.20
  → Writer slice (15%) ≈ $0.63
  → Performance (33%) ≈ $0.21
  → Mechanical (67%) ≈ $0.42

06What Recoup doesn't model

Honest scope. Some line items below are landing in a follow-up; others are permanently out of scope because they belong to your manual practice, not a recurring streaming projection:

• ·Distributor fees. DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby, AWAL all skim a slice and charge varying account fees. Differs per distributor; lands in the projection when you upload your distributor CSV.
• ·CMO admin fees. Each collection society (GEMA, SACEM, PRS, ASCAP, etc.) keeps an admin slice before paying you. We have the directory of rates (GEMA 9% dropping to 7% by 2027, SACEM 8% to 7% by 2026, PRS 5.5%, ASCAP 11%) but the application requires deciding which society applies under a multi-country audience — landing in a follow-up.
• ·Playlist and PR costs. Pay-for-placement and promo spend are outflows, not income. We don't track them.
• ·Spotify Discovery Mode. The 30% royalty cut for Discovery placements is real but opt-in per-track. Toggle landing in a follow-up.
• ·Sync, touring, merch, live performance royalties. Permanently out of scope. These belong to your manual practice — one-off income tracked outside the app, not a recurring streaming projection.

07Public sources behind the rates

The per-country rate table and the publishing-share splits are triangulated from these public sources. No keys or credentials appear here.

• STRSoundcharts — per-country streams across Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal, YouTube Music, Amazon. Documented at docs.soundcharts.com.
• RATSpotify Loud & Clear — per-country streaming rate anchors. Published yearly at loudandclear.byspotify.com.
• INDChartlex, IFPI, Music Business Worldwide, Trichordist — independently-published per-DSP rate snapshots used to cross-check the Spotify-anchor numbers.
• PUBCISAC / BIEM publications + national CMO rate cards — the publishing-share-of-stream and per-country perf/mech split coefficients. PRS, GEMA, SACEM, ASCAP, BMI, MLC, TONO, APRA AMCOS, JASRAC, KOMCA, BumaStemra and others.
• CRBUS Copyright Royalty Board — Phonorecords IV / V — the statutory US mechanical rate (15.1% rising to 15.35% by 2027). Phonorecords V proceeding opened January 2026.
• RADNRK PSAPI / SR open data / BBC RMS / ABC AU — first-party public-broadcaster play logs. Used by the native radio backends landing in a V2 follow-up.
• CMOPRS / GEMA / ASCAP / APRA / TONO / Gramo and similar CMO statements — entered manually by users, mapped to the statement tier above.