Royalty & Payout Policy
This policy explains how artist royalties are calculated for streams on Resonance itself — half of every listening subscription, allocated between the artists that subscriber actually played — and where payouts currently stand.
It is a different mechanism from the ASMusic Distribution & Artist Terms, which cover the 12–20% commission ASMusic charges for distributing your music to external platforms like Spotify and Apple Music through TuneCore. If your work streams on Resonance, this policy applies; if it's distributed off-platform via ASMusic, that separate policy applies instead.
This policy supplements the Creator & Distribution Terms and the Resonance Terms of Service.
These terms are published in good faith and are pending review by qualified EU/Estonian legal counsel; nothing here is a substitute for formal legal advice.
Read this first: payouts have not launched
Royalties are calculated and recorded, but we are not paying them out yet.
Every month we run the calculation described below, and your share is stored against your artist account. You can see your accrued balance in the Studio. What does not exist yet is the payment step: we have not connected a payout provider for Resonance, we have not collected anyone's bank or tax details for it, and no royalty has been paid to anyone. Every line in your payouts view will show as accrued, not paid, until this changes.
What we commit to. Accrued royalties are a real, recorded liability. They are not reset, expired, or written off while your account exists, and they survive you removing your catalogue or cancelling a Creator subscription. When payouts launch, accrued balances are paid under the rules in force at that time.
When. We will launch payouts once we have a payout provider connected and the identity, tax, and accounting handling that goes with it in place. We are not committing to a date, and you should not plan around one. When it is ready we will announce it and update this policy, including the payout schedule, the minimum payout threshold (we expect it to be around €20), and what you will need to provide.
If you are considering a Creator subscription, please make this part of your decision: today it buys you publishing, an artist page, and analytics on Resonance — not income.
1. How royalties are allocated
Half of every listening subscription goes to artists — and it follows the listener who paid it.
For each paying subscriber, in each month:
- 50% of what that person paid is allocated to artists.
- The remaining 50% covers tax (currently 24%) and operating Resonance (26%).
That 50% is then split between the artists that particular subscriber listened to, in proportion to their own counted streams that month. Your royalties are the sum of the slices you earned from each of your subscribers individually — not a share of one platform-wide pool.
What follows from this, and it is the point of the model:
- Only subscribers generate royalties. Plays from free accounts count towards your public stats and your reach, but they carry no money — and, equally, they cannot dilute anyone else's earnings.
- A stream has no fixed price. Its value depends on who played it and what else that person listened to that month. A subscriber who listens to you alone allocates their entire artist half to you; the same play from someone who listened to two hundred artists is worth a fraction of that.
- Chart position does not move your money. A hit being streamed by other people's subscribers takes nothing from you, because their money never enters a shared pool in the first place.
- Full allocation takes a month of actual listening. A subscriber's half is allocated in full once they reach 30 counted streams in the month — roughly a track a day. Below that, the same proportion is allocated: 10 streams allocate a third of the half, one stream allocates a thirtieth. Without this, a single accidental play would hand an artist the entire €3 of a Premium subscription, and that artist would out-earn one with a hundred streams from an engaged listener.
- If a subscriber listened to nothing that month, their artist half is not allocated at all. It is not spread across artists they never played.
Anything not allocated — the part held back below the activity threshold, the halves of subscribers who did not listen, and rounding — stays with APERTURESyndicate and is recorded as unallocated in that period's figures.
Which plans fund royalties. Premium, Symphony, and Family — the plans people pay in order to listen. A Family plan is paid by one person for up to 4 other people — five accounts in total — so the listening of the whole household splits that one subscription's artist half. The Creator plan does not fund royalties: it is a publishing fee for hosting and distributing your own catalogue, not a payment for listening.
The half follows the price of the plan: Symphony costs twice what Premium does, so a Symphony subscriber moves roughly twice as much money to the artists they play. If someone holds more than one listening plan at once, half of each is allocated.
2. What counts as a stream
A play is counted toward your royalty share when a listener plays the track for at least 30 seconds of actual playback. Counted plays by listeners without a listening subscription still appear in your stats, but allocate no money — only a subscriber's own plays divide that subscriber's contribution. Time spent seeking or skipping is not playback, and a single play can never count for more than the track's own length.
Repeat plays of the same track by the same listener do count separately — each play is counted once. What we deduplicate is the same single playback being reported more than once (for example after a network retry), so one play cannot be counted twice.
We do not currently run stream-manipulation detection. There is no bot detection, no per-listener cap, and no automated filtering of artificially inflated plays behind these numbers. We apply request rate limits and the duration rules above, and that is the extent of it today.
That does not make manipulation acceptable. Artificially inflating stream counts is prohibited by the Resonance Terms of Service and the Acceptable Use Policy. We may investigate any account manually, exclude plays we conclude were manipulated, adjust or withhold the resulting royalties, and suspend or terminate the account. If we introduce automated detection, we will describe it here.
Plays of your own tracks from your own account are not excluded automatically.
3. What counts as revenue
Only revenue from Resonance listening plans for the period is included: Premium, Symphony, and Family. Resonance does not run an advertising model, so there is no ad revenue in this calculation. Creator subscriptions, revenue from other APERTURESyndicate products, and platform bundles are not included.
Each subscription is valued at its list price for that month, derived from the subscriptions active during the period rather than from individual invoices — so it is an approximation of recognised revenue rather than an accounting statement. A subscription is included for a month if it existed before the month ended and its paid period reached into it. Annual subscriptions are counted at the lower of the monthly price and one twelfth of the annual price, because the record of the subscription does not carry its billing period; where the amount is uncertain we take the lower figure rather than allocate money that may not have been collected.
4. Calculation schedule
The calculation for a period covers the previous calendar month and is attempted daily at 03:00 UTC until it succeeds. It normally closes the month on the 1st; the daily retry exists so that a period is not lost if a run cannot complete (for example if the subscription prices are momentarily unavailable — we would rather leave the month open than close it on invented figures).
Each period is calculated write-once: once a run for a given month completes, the month is finalised and is not re-run, recalculated, or duplicated. If we discover a calculation error, we correct it manually rather than re-running the period.
5. No guarantees
We do not guarantee any particular number of streams, audience size, revenue, or payout. What you accrue depends entirely on how much subscribers actually listened to you in that period — which varies, and which is small on a young platform. An artist with a large free audience and no subscribers among it accrues nothing.
Nothing in this policy is a promise of income.
6. Questions about your numbers
If you have questions about your monthly stream count or royalty calculation, contact [email protected] and request a breakdown of your counted streams for the period in question. We aim to respond within 5 working days.
We are a micro enterprise. We answer questions about your own account and figures; we do not publish periodic transparency reports and do not operate a formal appeals body.
7. After you stop distributing on Resonance
If you remove your catalogue or stop uploading to Resonance, royalties already accrued for completed periods remain recorded and payable under this policy once payouts launch. Cancelling a Creator subscription does not cancel them either.
Once your catalogue is no longer live on Resonance, no further streams can be counted, so no new royalties accrue after that point.
Contact
- Royalty and payout questions: [email protected]
Operator APERTURESyndicate OÜ · Registry code 17384111 · VAT EE102972654 Priisle tee 8, Lasnamäe linnaosa, Tallinn, Harju maakond, 13914, Estonia Company registration details
This policy is governed by the laws of Estonia, with the courts of Tallinn having jurisdiction, and is subject to the GDPR, the EU Digital Services Act, and applicable Estonian and EU consumer-protection law. The English-language version of this policy is the controlling version.
Version history
- v2.1 — 2026-09-03 — Replaced the platform-wide pool with a per-subscriber allocation. Previously 70% of all Resonance subscription revenue formed one pool split by each artist's share of every stream on the service, which meant plays by non-paying listeners moved other people's money. Now 50% of each subscriber's own payment is split between the artists that subscriber listened to; tax (24%) and operating the service (26%) take the other half. Creator subscriptions no longer fund royalties — that plan is a publishing fee, not a payment for listening. Added an activity threshold — 30 counted streams in the month unlock a subscriber's full half, below which the same proportion is allocated — and stated that unallocated money stays with the operator. Added how Family seats, multiple plans, and annual subscriptions are valued.
- v2.0 — 2026-07-31 — Corrected to match reality. Payouts have not launched: the previous version described payment via Stripe Connect with a €20 threshold as if it were live, and it is not. Removed the claims of anti-fraud checks and of deduplicating repeated plays within a session — neither exists; the actual counting and deduplication rules are now stated plainly. The pool is funded by all Resonance plans, not Premium alone. Corrected the calculation time to 03:00 UTC.
- v1.0 — 2026-07-02 — Initial publication.