A stream pays fractions of a cent, and it is split before the artist sees it. Label, distributor, publisher and platform all take a cut first. Most artists are not underpaid by one villain. They are underpaid by a chain of intermediaries, each taking a reasonable-looking share.

Payout per stream is what the platform pays the rights holder, not what the artist receives.

There is no single royalty. A recording has one set of rights and the underlying song has another. The same play can generate a master royalty and a publishing royalty, owned by different people, paid on different schedules.

Master rights cover the specific recording. Publishing rights cover the composition itself.

A ledger is good at one thing: recording who owns what, publicly, in a way nobody can quietly rewrite. That solves a real problem, because rights ownership is currently tracked in private databases that disagree with each other. It does not make anyone listen to your music.

On-chain means the record lives on a public ledger rather than in a company's private database.

Most Web3 music projects sold speculation, not distribution. An NFT that promises royalty share is a security in most jurisdictions, whatever it is called on the website. Projects that could not say plainly where the revenue came from generally had no revenue.

Speculative token is any asset whose value depends on the next buyer rather than on income it produces.

Ask three questions of any platform. Who holds the master rights after I upload. Where does the money come from, in one sentence, without the word ecosystem. Can I leave and take my catalogue with me. A platform that cannot answer all three plainly has answered you.

Rights reversion is your ability to take your catalogue back and leave.

Register your works with a performing rights organisation before anything else. It is free or near-free, it is the mechanism that actually pays, and it works whether or not any of this technology succeeds. Everything else is optional until that is done.

PRO is a performing rights organisation. In the US: ASCAP, BMI, SESAC.