Music, on your own terms
Going cold turkey, without the misery.
Quitting the label path, the algorithm, and the received wisdom about how music is supposed to work. Two desks, one that argues and one that counts, written by someone who releases his own records rather than someone selling a course about it.
Read the latest take Open the free split sheet toolRap Ledger
What the paperwork actually costs
Checked against the distributors' own pricing pages on 31 July 2026, not comparison sites.
Where your subscription goes
You pay the same every month and none of it follows what you played. See where it actually lands, and what your favourite artist really got from you.
Free toolDistributor cost calculator
Put in what you release and what you earn. It ranks all four on what they actually cost you, fees plus the royalties they take.
Free toolRelease timeline builder
Pick a drop date, get every deadline backwards from it with real dates. Including the two you genuinely cannot move.
Free toolSplit sheet calculator
Add everyone in the room, split the writing and the master, see instantly if it totals 100%. Prints something signable.
The numbersWhat distribution costs in 2026
Four distributors, the break-even maths, and a dated note listing the four figures an earlier draft got wrong.
The two desks
One is loud on purpose. The other is boring on purpose. They need each other.
Opinions, left to cool
Arguments about music that had to survive contact with evidence first. A hot take is what you say straight away; a cold take is the same opinion after someone checked.
The indexEvery claim, and whether it survived
One searchable page listing every factual claim this site has made, what happened when it was checked, and where it came from. Including the ones that were wrong.
Rap LedgerThe money and the paperwork
Split sheets, distributor fees, publishing, release timing. Free browser tools and dated, sourced numbers for the unglamorous half of putting music out.
The rule
Publishing what you got wrong is the cheapest credibility available, and almost nobody does it. Why every piece ends with the receipts
Every piece closes with the same three-part block: what holds up, what's shaky, and what didn't survive checking. That last section is the point. It's where an earlier draft's four wrong distributor figures live, and where I record that I wrongly said Ace Hood had stopped releasing music.
When a number here turns out to be wrong, the page changes and says so, with the date.
Why this exists
Going cold turkey means quitting the thing everyone tells you that you can't quit. Cool turkey is doing it without the misery, and without pretending it's easy. For artists that means the label path and the guru advice. For everyone else it means the feed deciding what you hear.
There's an enormous amount of music media covering who is beefing with whom, and almost none covering the fact that your distributor quietly takes 20% of your TikTok money, or that the research on whether lyrics even matter says something stranger than either side of that argument believes. Both of those are worth someone's time.