Royalty & Payout Policy
This policy explains how artist royalties are calculated for streams on Resonance itself — our internal revenue-share pool funded by Resonance subscriptions — 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 the pool works
Each month, 70% of the subscription revenue we recognise from Resonance plans for that period is allocated to a revenue-share pool for artists. All Resonance plans contribute — Premium, Symphony, Family, and Creator. Your share of the pool is proportional to your share of all counted streams on Resonance during that month: more counted streams, relative to everyone else's, means a larger slice.
We do not pay a fixed rate "per stream." Your share depends on total Resonance subscription revenue that month and on how your streams compare with every other artist's, so the value of a single stream varies from month to month. In a month with few subscribers, it will be very small.
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. 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 subscription plans for the period is included in the pool calculation. Resonance does not run an advertising model, so there is no ad revenue in this calculation. Revenue from other APERTURESyndicate products and from platform bundles is not included.
The figure is 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.
4. Calculation schedule
The monthly calculation runs once, on the 1st of each month at 03:00 UTC, covering the previous calendar month.
Each period is calculated write-once: once the run for a given month completes, it 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 real listening activity on Resonance and on total subscription revenue for the period — both of which vary, and both of which are small on a young platform.
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
- v2.0 — 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.