We post our work. Read it, dispute it, copy it.

Most royalty estimators in the indie space hand you a single dollar figure with no footnotes. We don't. The Royalty Reckoning tool returns a range, a slider, and this page. Free to read, free to critique, free to fork into your own tool. We publish it because the industry doesn't.

The promise we won't make

We will not tell you "you are owed $4,200." We will tell you the recoverable range is, for example, $1,800 to $7,400, with a midpoint around $4,200, and we will show you a slider for the recovery window because nobody knows in advance whether your unclaimed pool is three years deep or ten. The single-number version is a marketing artifact. The range is closer to the truth.

Where the numbers come from

The model takes one input you give us — an artist name or a Spotify URL — and pulls everything else from public sources. From there it has four stages.

1. Catalog scan. Spotify's public catalog API is used to pull the artist's primary-artist tracks, their popularity scores (0–100), their ISRCs, and their earliest release dates. "Appears on" credits are excluded from the primary count; we track them separately.
2. Per-track stream estimate. Each track's popularity score maps to a per-year stream range. The mapping is fit against real publisher royalty statements from independent songwriter catalogs Doom Tide has recovered for — not against industry-published guesses. Older tracks get scaled down by a track-age multiplier, because a popularity-30 track from 2010 doesn't stream like a popularity-30 track from 2024.
3. Dollars per year. Stream counts get converted to dollars across two royalty types: mechanical (US-share-aware, built from the real per-DSP rates The MLC publishes each month and weighted by a typical platform mix, since the DSPs don't pay the same rate per play) and performance (PRO blanket pools, global). The figures behind those conversions come from real rate sheets and statements; they are not the U.S. statutory headline rate, because the headline rate is not what an indie songwriter actually receives.
4. Recovery window. The floor is three years — the active unclaimed pool the MLC and U.S. PROs hold before market-share redistribution kicks in. The ceiling extends up to ten years for never-registered catalogs, because the MLC absorbed pre-existing unclaimed mechanical pools when it came online under the Music Modernization Act of 2018. The slider on the result page lets you pick where in that three-to-ten-year window your catalog actually sits.

What we exclude on purpose

Every exclusion below is a number a less careful estimator would inflate the headline with. We don't, because each one is harder to recover than it sounds.

• Cover songs. Royalties flow to whoever wrote the song, not whoever recorded it. If the catalog has covers, those royalties belong to the original writers — not the artist on this report. Spotify metadata doesn't reliably distinguish covers from originals, so we don't auto-subtract them. Subtract them mentally.
• Pre-2021 mechanicals already paid. The MLC's "historical unmatched" pool gets cited a lot, but most pre-2021 mechanicals were already paid through HFA or major-publisher channels. Treating "every stream before 2021" as recoverable is the most common overestimation in indie royalty marketing. We don't.
• Synchronization income. If you already have a sync placement, you already have the contract. Our estimate doesn't try to predict future sync deals you haven't signed.
• Neighboring rights and master-side digital performance income. These pay master-side, not composition-side. The Reckoning is a composition-side tool. Doom Tide does not currently administer this revenue stream.
• Foreign collections routed through a sub-publisher. If you have a foreign sub-publishing chain, those territories' royalties flow through your sub-publisher's deal — not directly recoverable by you. The per-DSP mechanical rates we use are the U.S. (MLC) rates, so the estimate stays inside Doom Tide's U.S. scope; we don't double-count by assuming foreign CMOs are also leaking the same income.

What can throw the estimate off

• Popularity 60+ is extrapolated. Our calibration sample is mostly indie/rock songwriters in the popularity 0–60 range. Above that, the mapping is extrapolated. Big-catalog or high-popularity artists should treat their numbers as the least precise on the page.
• No territory split per artist. The model assumes a U.S. share of streams. Artists with a heavily non-U.S. listener base will be over- or under-estimated depending on which way their split runs. Spotify popularity is global; U.S. share is not artist-specific in our current model.
• Classical, instrumental, and ambient catalogs. The popularity-to-streams fit is calibrated on indie/rock. We haven't yet fit a separate curve for classical or ambient catalogs. A revision is open.
• Brand-new artists. Below three years of catalog age, the recovery window collapses to its floor. The estimate gets conservative on purpose — there's no ten-year tail to recover from yet.
• Missing Spotify release dates. A handful of older tracks have no release date in the Spotify catalog. We treat those as zero years old in the decay model, which is conservative. Real release dates from your distributor would tighten the estimate.

The assumptions that matter most

Two assumptions are doing most of the work. If either one is wrong for your catalog, the estimate moves a lot.

1. 100% composition ownership. The estimate assumes you wrote the songs and own 100% of the publishing. Co-writers and assigned publishing change that. If you wrote half the songs and half of those have a co-writer, multiply by your actual composition share to get a defensible number.
2. Currently unregistered. The estimate assumes the works are not currently registered with the MLC or a PRO and that no admin is acting for you. If you (or someone working for you) are already registered, most of this income is already being collected — what's left is the gaps, not the whole stack.

Why we publish this

The industry standard for independent-songwriter royalty estimators is a single big number on a marketing page, framed as money you're owed, with no model behind it that anyone can read. The reason for that standard is obvious: the bigger the number, the more conversions. The reason we don't follow it is also obvious: independent songwriters have been getting that pitch for two decades, and most of them still aren't recovering their actual income.

So we publish the method. It's not proprietary because the methods aren't actually scarce — what's scarce is the discipline to refuse the inflated number. If a competitor wants to copy the structure of this page, they should. The work is in maintaining it.

We update this page when the math changes. Sometimes that's monthly. Sometimes it's quarterly. The revisions section below is the record.

Revisions

Every change to the model, the disclosure, or the wire response gets a dated row. The most recent change is at the top.

Suggest a correction

Found a mistake, a missing exclusion, or a fresher data point? Send it. We read every submission. The ones that lead to an actual model change get a dated row in Revisions above — with attribution if you give us a name.