Music, on your own terms
Going cold turkey, without the misery.
Quitting the label path, the algorithm, and the received wisdom about how music is supposed to work. Free tools and straight numbers for the unglamorous half of putting your own records out, built by someone who releases his own rather than someone selling a course about it.
Open the free split sheet tool What distribution actually costsThe tools
The jobs you end up doing at 2am in a Notes app
Splits, distributor fees, release timing, royalties. All four run in the browser and ask you for nothing.
Where your subscription goes
You pay the same every month and none of it follows what you played. See where it actually lands, and what your favourite artist really got from you.
Free toolDistributor cost calculator
Put in what you release and what you earn. It ranks all four on what they actually cost you, fees plus the royalties they take.
Free toolBeat licence decoder
What you actually bought when you leased that beat, how close you are to the stream cap, and what crossing it costs.
Free toolRelease timeline builder
Pick a drop date, get every deadline backwards from it with real dates. Including the two you genuinely cannot move.
Free toolSplit sheet calculator
Add everyone in the room, split the writing and the master, see instantly if it totals 100%. Prints something signable.
The numbersWhat distribution costs in 2026
Four distributors, the break-even maths, and a dated note listing the four figures an earlier draft got wrong.
Where to start
Three ways in, depending on whether you want the answer, the working, or the reason to believe any of it.
How this is put together
Who writes it, where the numbers come from, what is checked by hand and what is not, and the rule that came out of getting four figures wrong at once.
The indexEvery claim, and whether it survived
One searchable page listing every factual claim this site has made, what happened when it was checked, and where it came from. Including the ones that were wrong.
Rap LedgerThe money and the paperwork
Split sheets, distributor fees, publishing, release timing. Free browser tools and dated, sourced numbers for the unglamorous half of putting music out.
The rule
Publishing what you got wrong is the cheapest credibility available, and almost nobody does it. Why there is a corrections index at all
Every number on this site is sorted into one of three piles: what holds up, what is shaky, and what did not survive checking. That last pile is the point. It is where an earlier draft's four wrong distributor figures live, along with the two break-even numbers that had been calculated from one of them and moved when it was corrected.
When a number here turns out to be wrong, the page changes and says so, with the date, and the old figure stays visible rather than being quietly swapped out.
Why this exists
Going cold turkey means quitting the thing everyone tells you that you can't quit. Cool turkey is doing it without the misery, and without pretending it's easy. For artists that means the label path and the guru advice. For everyone else it means the feed deciding what you hear.
There is an enormous amount of music media covering who is beefing with whom, and almost none covering the fact that your distributor quietly takes 20% of your TikTok money, or that the pitch deadline you just missed was seven days and published. The creative side of independent music is well served. The administrative side, which is the part that decides whether you keep any of your money, is barely covered at all.