Glossary

A copy of a release that you own. A Record carries the release it came from, which pressing and edition it belongs to, its number within that edition, what you paid, in which currency, and when — all fixed at purchase and publicly checkable.

Unlike a file in a streaming library, a Record is yours to keep, transfer, or sell. Where the artist has published an interactive edition, it is also the thing you step into and remix.

One run of Records from a release, in the sense a vinyl pressing means a run. An artist can open a pressing with a fixed number of copies or leave it open-ended, and each pressing numbers its own copies from one.

Because copies are numbered per pressing, being the tenth copy of the first pressing is a durable fact about the past, not a badge that can be reissued later.

The label on a pressing, and the position of a Record inside it. Every Record reads as edition and number — the second edition, copy 41 — and both are set when the copy is made.

An artist can run several editions of the same release at once: a first pressing capped at 500, an open edition that never closes, a tour edition.

The separate parts a song was mixed from — the vocal, the drums, the bass, the guitars — kept apart instead of flattened into one stereo file.

Stems are what makes an interactive Record possible. Handing them to a listener is a real decision for an artist, so preparing an interactive edition is something Miso does together with the artist, not a self-serve upload.

Changing the balance of a song while it plays: pull the vocal up, solo the drums, mute a guitar, hear the take without the overdubs.

The Record ships with the artist’s own mix as the starting point. Mixing happens on your device, in real time, from the artist’s stems.

The single artifact an interactive Record is delivered as: the stems, the artist’s mix settings, and the exact audio engine version they were tuned against, bundled together and checked for integrity.

Pinning the engine is what makes the mix portable. The same session played next year sounds like the artist intended it to, not like whatever the software has drifted into since.

Where a pressing goes on sale. A listing sets the price for one pressing in one currency — a fixed price, or a floor that accepts more — and can be switched on and off by the artist.

Buying through a listing does two things in the same moment: it hands you the Record, and it sends the full payment to the release.

The song as written — the melody, the chords, the words. It exists before anyone records it and outlives every recording of it.

A composition sets one number at the moment it is created: the share of a recording’s income that goes back to the writing side. That number is fixed and cannot be renegotiated afterward.

One captured performance of a composition. Two artists covering the same song produce two recordings of one composition; a live take and the studio take are likewise two recordings.

Every recording names the composition it came from, so the writing side stays attached no matter who records it or where it ends up.

A recording’s place on one specific release, with the cut it takes of that release’s income.

The distinction matters because the same recording can appear on the album, the deluxe edition, and a compilation, each time on different terms. A track is the recording plus those terms, and it is fixed once the release is published.

An ordered set of tracks published together — a single, an EP, an album. The release is also the address money is paid to, so a buyer, a streaming service, or a licensee pays one place and never needs to know how the income divides.

Its track list and splits are fixed at publication. Nothing gets quietly re-cut afterward.

A person or a group, as the record knows them: an artist, a writer, a producer, a band, a label, a publisher.

A group is a party made of parties, and joining one takes agreement on both sides. Nobody can list you as a member without your consent.

A party plus the roles they played on a work — wrote it, produced it, engineered it, sang on it.

Credits are attached to the work itself rather than typed into a distributor’s form, so they travel with the song wherever it is used and stay readable by anyone.

The chain of facts about where something came from: which composition, which recording, which release, which pressing, who made it, who bought the first copy.

Provenance is the thing Miso protects. Audio can be copied and, increasingly, generated. The fact that a particular artist made a particular record, and that you were the first person to buy it, cannot be.

The ownership record for a work. Each composition and each recording has exactly ten million shares, and whoever holds them owns that work and is paid from it.

Shares are ownership, not an investment product. Miso does not offer or promise a return on them.

How a release’s income divides across its tracks, and how each track’s income divides between its recording and composition sides.

Splits are set when the release is published and add up to the whole. They are readable by anyone and cannot be changed after the fact.

Where a work’s income waits for the people who own it. Money arriving at a recording or composition lands in its pool, and every shareholder can take their proportional part of it.

The pool tracks each holder’s entitlement continuously, so ownership that changes hands mid-period does not need a reconciliation department to sort out.

Taking your share out of a royalty pool. Payment into a work and payout to its owners are separate steps: money settles to the work quickly, and each owner draws their part whenever they choose.

Nothing expires and there is no minimum. An unclaimed balance sits in the pool with your name on it.

The path a payment takes from a buyer to the people who own the music. Pay a release; the payment divides by the release’s own fixed track splits and moves to each recording; each recording’s share lands in its royalty pool; owners claim from the pool.

Every hop is fixed by the release’s published data, so no one along the way can redirect the money — including Miso. What a payer needs to know is one address.

The cut of a recording’s income that belongs to the composition behind it, set at the composition’s creation and applied to every recording of it automatically.

Because a composition holds ownership of its recordings directly, income earned by a recording flows back to the songwriters without anyone filing a claim, matching a code, or waiting on a statement cycle.

The single place Miso writes who made a work, who owns it, and where its money goes. Anyone can read it — you do not need an account, an API key, or Miso’s permission.

This is the part that makes the rest possible. Music’s payment problem has rarely been moving money; it has been that six different organizations keep six different ledgers and money moves at the speed of the slowest reconciliation between them.

Anyone can publish to the record, read from it, or build on it without asking Miso first. No allowlist, no approval queue, no account with us.

It also means the steps that move settlement forward can be run by anyone, since none of them can change where the money goes.

Written once and not editable afterward. Splits, track lists, royalty rates, and a Record’s purchase details are all immutable.

The tradeoff is deliberate and worth naming: getting a split wrong means publishing a new release, not quietly correcting the old one. In exchange, nobody can rewrite the terms after the money starts arriving. Descriptive details — artwork, credits, notes — stay editable by the people who own the work.

Copy protection on audio. Miso ships none — no encryption, no device locks, no licence server between you and a record you own.

Every scheme deployed at scale in recorded media has been broken, usually within months, and the industry itself dropped DRM from purchased music between 2007 and 2009. Miso secures rights and records instead of playback: what a copy claims about itself, who owns the work, and where paying for it sends the money.

The open, permissionless layer underneath: compositions, recordings, releases, parties, shares, and the settlement path between them. It is published openly and anyone can build on it.

Miso the product is one thing built on that protocol. The split is deliberate — if Miso stops existing, the record and the rights on it do not depend on us to keep working.

A resolver that turns the identifiers music already runs on — ISRC for a recording, ISWC for a composition, UPC for a release — into an address that can be read and paid.

An outside system with a column of ISRCs can pay a recording without learning anything about how Miso works. Miso Link asserts that a code points at a work; it does not assign or register identifiers, which remains the job of the agencies that issue them.

Status: built and tested. The namespace is not populated yet, so nothing resolves today.

A payment with a receipt attached. Anyone can already pay a work directly; Miso Pay welds a typed, permanent receipt to that payment so the payer can reconcile it against their own books — a statement period, a usage count, an identifier, a memo.

Paying deposits money at the work. It does not itself pay every shareholder; distribution and claims follow.

Status: built and tested, not yet live.

A planned streaming meter where your subscription is allocated to what you actually played, rather than pooled and divided by everyone’s play counts.

The planned shape is a per-second rate, a 15% platform fee, and weekly settlement into the same path every other payment takes.

Status: in development, not live. Treat the numbers above as the plan, not a price.

A mixing and mastering console that runs in the browser, aimed at the final mix rather than the whole production. It offers a focused set of console-grade tools — EQ, compression, gating, filters — and deliberately leaves out the rest of a production suite.

Every move in a session is attributed and signed, so a mix carries a record of who shaped it, human or agent, and can be replayed change by change.

Status: in active development.