Who Stands Between a Fan and an Artist

Spotify Premium costs $12.99 a month in the US. Say you spend a month listening mostly to one song. The singer is signed to a label, and the songwriter has a publishing deal. Where does your money go?

By Spotify’s account, roughly two-thirds of its music revenue goes to royalties, about four-fifths of that for the recording and one-fifth for the song. Then the money starts passing through companies. On a US stream like yours we count five before it reaches anyone who made the music: Spotify, the label, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the MLC), a performing rights organization such as ASCAP or BMI, and the publisher. (If the singer had released the song themselves, a distributor would sit where the label is.)

Each of those companies does something for its share. So we asked one question about each of them: if your money could go straight to the people who own the song and the recording, with the splits already agreed, would this company still have work to do?

Two of the five wouldn’t. That isn’t because they do the job badly. It’s because their job is moving money and working out who it belongs to. The other three would still have real work: Spotify, the label and the publisher. Those three are the interesting ones, because each of them also controls how the money moves, and we think that control, more than the work, is where their power over artists comes from.

The Recording’s Share

Most of your money is for the recording, and it goes to the label first, because the label usually owns the recording. The singer is paid a royalty by the label, at whatever rate their contract says. The UK competition regulator studied the major labels’ deals with new artists and found the average gross royalty rate was 23.3 percent in 2021, up from 19.7 percent in 2012. Producers are usually paid out of that.

Then comes recoupment. The label’s advance and most of the recording costs are paid back out of the singer’s royalties before the singer sees anything. Older contracts add more: reserves held back against returns, royalties paid on only 90 percent of sales, advances from past albums taken out of the new one’s earnings. The singer’s share of your $12.99 is a percentage of a percentage, after a line of deductions.

The Song’s Share

The smaller slice, for the song, takes the longer road. The MLC collects the royalty for reproducing the song on a stream, matches each stream to a song and each song to its owners, and pays them. A performing rights organization separately collects the royalty for the song being performed. Then the publisher takes its share: in a standard deal it keeps the whole publisher’s half of the song’s income, and a songwriter in a co-publishing deal keeps about 75 percent of the total.

The matching step is where money gets lost. As of February 2026 the MLC held $328.2 million it hadn’t matched to any registered song. Money that’s never matched can eventually be handed out by market share, which sends most of it to the publishers with the biggest catalogs. So money owed to one songwriter can end up with a publisher that had nothing to do with the song.

That’s the whole reason these collecting layers exist. At the moment you pay, the system doesn’t know who owns the song or how it’s split, so someone has to collect the money in a lump and work it out afterward. The performing rights organizations deserve credit for one more useful thing: a single licence covering a whole catalog saves everyone from negotiating song by song. But most of the rest is paperwork that only exists because ownership wasn’t written down before the money moved.

Three Companies With Real Jobs

Spotify, the label and the publisher pass the test. Each one sells real work and the payment plumbing for its part of the chain as a single package.

Spotify builds the app, licenses the catalog and recommends music. It also writes the payment rules for the first hop: how the pool of money is divided, what gets deducted, and when it goes out.

Labels find artists, fund them and market their records, and that work is real and expensive. The labels’ trade body says they spent $9.3 billion on finding and marketing artists in 2025. The UK regulator’s data adds what that figure leaves out. In 2021 the UK majors spent 24 percent of revenue on those things, but only 17 percent after counting what they earned back from artists, because “typically the majority of these costs are recoupable by the label from artist royalties.” The singer is already paying for much of the creative help. They pay through the ownership deal instead of a fee.

Publishers pitch songs to artists and to film and TV, set up co-writing sessions and develop writers. They already treat that work and the paperwork as separate things. Universal Music Publishing runs its registration and royalty processing as its own unit, Global Administration, apart from its creative team. That’s the clearest sign we’ve found that the package can be split.

The Bundle

Labels and publishers are the only companies in the chain that do creative work, and the only ones that own the copyrights. Selling those two things together is the bundle, and ownership is what puts them first in line for your money: the money goes to the owner, and the owner pays the artist.

In a traditional record deal the label owns the recording, often for the whole life of the copyright. Recoupment, including taking an old album’s unpaid advance out of a new album’s royalties, only works because the label holds the money before the singer sees it. And the label’s share lasts as long as the ownership, whether or not anyone is still working on the record.

Our guess is that the bundle exists for physical reasons. A label once pressed records and collected payment from thousands of shops, so holding the money was part of the job. The internet took away most of that work. The ownership stayed, and so did the label’s place between your money and the singer.

What Changes

Here’s what’s live on Miso today. Who owns the song and the recording, and how each track’s money is split, is written down before anyone pays, and it can’t be edited later. A fan pays the release, and from there the money moves in steps that anyone can kick off, but it can only go where the splits say. Each owner collects their share when they choose; one payment doesn’t pay everyone at once. It’s live on Sui Mainnet, the main public network of the Sui blockchain. Miso doesn’t decide who wrote a song; it enforces the splits people agreed to. Streaming is in development, and early prototypes show the design works.

What follows from that is a forecast. If ownership is settled before the money moves, the companies whose only job is matching and forwarding have much less to do, except where a law requires them. Spotify keeps building the app but stops writing the payment rules: a play would pay the release, and the split would come from the release itself. (No streaming service has integrated with Miso. This is where we think things go, not where they are.)

Labels and publishers become companies the artist hires, for a fee, a project price or a share of a specific release. That share is written into the release’s splits and paid the same way as the artist’s own.

That market already exists. In what the industry calls artist and label services deals, the artist keeps the copyright and licenses it for a short term. AWAL, owned by Sony, takes 15 percent on a licence that rolls over every 30 days, and tells artists “You own everything.” Universal’s Virgin Music Group bought Downtown, another services company, in February 2026. The word “services” doesn’t guarantee much, though. UnitedMasters tells artists they keep full ownership, and its terms also give it a licence that lasts forever and can’t be cancelled. What matters is who owns the copyright, for how long, and who holds the money on its way to the artist.

We think the companies doing real work come out ahead. Today they pay, directly or through collecting societies, to rebuild who’s owed what after the money has moved. When ownership is written down first, most of that cost goes away, and a label or publisher keeps the work it’s hired for. A company whose only job is moving money doesn’t come out ahead. It loses its reason to exist.

The Case for Today’s Deals

The best argument for today’s deals is risk. A label paid a percentage only gets paid if the record earns, while a fee is owed either way. For a new artist with no money, that can be the better deal. Someone has to bankroll a record that hasn’t been made yet, and faster payment doesn’t change that.

What we object to is a cut that never ends and that the artist can’t route around. An artist who doesn’t need a label to get paid can still hire one for the work, and we expect the good ones to keep getting hired.