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 how they reach your bank account.

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.

In short

Half of what each subscriber actually paid us for listening, excluding VAT, is split between the artists that subscriber played.
Each month is closed on the 1st, and your share lands in your wallet in Earnings — one balance for everything you earn on APERTURESyndicate.
You connect a bank account through Stripe and withdraw from €20 — with a button, or automatically on the 1st of each month.
If you are paid as a private individual, we withhold 22% income tax and pay it to the Estonian Tax and Customs Board for you.

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, excluding VAT, is allocated to artists.
The other 50% covers operating Resonance. VAT is not ours to share: it goes to the tax authority and is part of neither half.

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 artist half 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.

Artists without income

Some artists have income from plays switched off. Plays of such an artist split a subscriber's half on equal terms with everyone else's — otherwise their share would go to the other artists the same person listened to — but the part that falls to them is not passed on: it stays with APERTURESyndicate and is recorded separately in that period's figures, as waived.

An artist ends up without income in one of four ways:

Open catalogue. Artists from the Audius network (see Open Catalogue) count as artists without income from their first day in the catalogue: their tracks are available to us under the free Audius licence.
The artist's choice. An artist can waive income themselves in the Creators Studio — the procedure is in Section 13 of the Creator & Distribution Terms.
Agreement. The platform may switch off an artist's income under a written agreement with them.
Free licence. Recordings we add ourselves from the public domain or under a Creative Commons licence carry no income from their first day: the licence already allows their use without payment, and there is no agreement with the author to pay under.

An artist's waiver, a switch-off by agreement, and reversing either take effect from the next settlement month: the current month is finished under the previous mode. A change can be reversed the same way — again from the next month. No royalties accrue for months without income, either at the time or retroactively, and a change does not affect anything already accrued for past months. When an open-catalogue artist moves to Resonance directly, royalties start accruing to them from the month after the move. Every change is recorded in a log: who made it and when, from which month it applies, and — for an artist's own waiver — under which version of the Creator Terms.

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 former Creator plan, withdrawn on 2026-09-22, never funded royalties: it was a publishing fee, not a payment for listening.

The half follows what the subscriber paid: 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. A plan someone received without paying for it (see Section 3) moves nothing.

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 money we actually received for Resonance listening plans in the period: Premium, Symphony, and Family. Resonance does not run an advertising model, so there is no ad revenue in this calculation.

Paid invoices, not list prices. We take what the subscriber was actually charged — after discounts and credits — and remove the VAT shown on the invoice.
Payment fees are ours. The card processor's fee is not deducted from the artist half; we pay it out of our half.
Bundles. When a platform bundle includes a Resonance plan, Resonance's part of the payment is that plan's share of the bundle, measured by the separate monthly prices of the bundle's components. Revenue from other APERTURESyndicate products is not included.
Annual plans are spread over the months they cover: a yearly payment funds each of its twelve months with one twelfth. A payment that covers only part of a month funds that part.
Plans received without payment — granted by us, bought with ✦ stars, or won as an event reward — let the person listen, but bring no money and therefore fund no royalties. Their plays still count in your stats.
Refunds and chargebacks. Money returned to a subscriber before the month is closed is simply not in that month's revenue. Money returned after the month is closed is taken back from the artists that subscriber's payment funded, in proportion to the amount returned, as a negative line in their wallets (see Section 5).

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 our billing records are momentarily unavailable — we would rather leave the month open than close it on invented figures).

As soon as a month is closed, each artist's share is credited to the wallet of the person behind that artist, one line per artist per month. An artist that belongs to a community with no person assigned to receive its money keeps its royalties recorded until someone is assigned; they are not lost.

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. Your wallet and payouts

One wallet. Every person on APERTURESyndicate has one wallet for everything they earn — Resonance royalties and any other source — in Earnings. The wallet is a ledger: every credit, payout, tax withholding and correction is a separate line with its source and month. Lines are never edited afterwards; a correction is a new line.

Connecting a payout account. Payouts go through Stripe Connect. In Earnings, choose Set up payouts: Stripe verifies your identity and takes the bank account your money goes to. We never see your bank details. You can change them later from the same page, in your Stripe dashboard.

Tax status. Before your first payout you tell us how you are paid: as a private individual (with your Estonian personal identification code), as a sole proprietor (FIE), or as a company (with the registry code). The number is stored encrypted, and only its last four digits are shown back to you.

Private individuals: we withhold 22% income tax from each payout, declare it, and pay it to the Estonian Tax and Customs Board on your behalf. Your payout statement shows the amount earned, the tax withheld, and the amount sent.
FIE and companies: we pay the full amount without withholding once we have checked the registration. Declaring the income is then your responsibility.

Who can be paid today. Payout accounts can currently be opened only by people and businesses in Estonia. If you are elsewhere, your royalties still accrue in your wallet and are kept; when we extend payouts to other countries, we will update this policy.

Withdrawing. The minimum payout is €20. A payout always sends the whole available balance.

Manually: the Withdraw button in Earnings, once your payout account is ready, your tax status is filled in, and at least the minimum is available.
Automatically: on by default. On the 1st of each month, after the previous month is closed, we pay out everyone whose available balance reaches the minimum; if a source has not closed yet, we retry daily until the 5th. At most one automatic payout a month. You can switch this off in Earnings.

The money is transferred to your Stripe account, and Stripe sends it to your bank on its own schedule, usually within a few working days. Every payout comes with an email and a PDF statement.

Holding period for new accounts. For a payout account younger than 90 days, royalties become available for withdrawal 60 days after they are credited. A card payment can be disputed for months, and this keeps us from paying out money that is later taken back. Your wallet shows what is available now and what is still held.

Negative balance. If a subscriber's payment is refunded or charged back after the month was closed, the returned share appears in your wallet as a negative line. While the balance is negative, withdrawals are paused, and new royalties offset it first.

Failed payouts. If a transfer is rejected, the amount returns to your wallet in full and we try again. If a transfer is reversed later, the amount comes back to your wallet as a separate line.

Your balance is kept. It does not expire and is not written off while your account exists, including after you remove your catalogue or stop publishing on Resonance.

6. 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.

7. Questions about your numbers

If you have questions about your monthly stream count, royalty calculation, or a payout, 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.

8. After you stop distributing on Resonance

If you remove your catalogue or stop uploading to Resonance, royalties already accrued for completed periods stay in your wallet and are paid out under Section 5. Leaving Resonance does not cancel them.

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

v3.0 — 2026-10-19 — Payouts have launched. Royalties are credited to your wallet in Earnings as soon as a month is closed and are withdrawn through Stripe Connect from €20, by button or automatically on the 1st; 22% income tax is withheld from private individuals; new payout accounts have a holding period; payouts are available in Estonia for now. The base is now money actually received: half of each subscriber's paid invoices excluding VAT, instead of half of the list price with tax taken out of the other half. Annual plans are spread over the months they cover, bundles contribute Resonance's share, and plans received without payment fund nothing. Refunds and chargebacks are deducted before a month closes and taken back from wallets after it. The figures for July–September 2026 had been computed at list price from subscriptions granted without payment — no money was received for them — and are voided: they are shown struck through and are not part of any balance.
v2.4 — 2026-10-04 — Artists without income now include a fourth way: recordings added from the public domain or under a Creative Commons licence.
v2.3 — 2026-10-01 — The example in Section 1 no longer quotes a fixed amount, and the Creator plan is described as withdrawn.
v2.2 — 2026-09-26 — Added artists without income: Audius open-catalogue artists, an artist's voluntary waiver, and a switch-off under a written agreement. Their plays split a listener's subscription on equal terms with everyone else's, and their share stays with APERTURESyndicate and is recorded separately (waived) rather than being redistributed to other artists. A change of mode takes effect from the next settlement month and is reversible; no royalties accrue for months without income.
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.

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