Field Notes from the desk.
Dispatches from inside the work. Forensic case histories from the Black Box desk, methodology papers from the research team, market briefs sized in dollars rather than rhetoric. Fifteen pieces in research this quarter. First filings posting May 2026.
An estimated $561M sits unclaimed at the MLC. That is one country, one rights type.
The scale of the black box, measured in dollars rather than rhetoric. And what a single-country figure implies globally.
Why a streaming spike in Helsinki is a question, not an answer.
Anomalies are cheap. Evidence is not. A short paper on the difference between a chart movement and a verified listening event.
Recovering £340,000 of uncollected royalties across a 2,100-title catalogue.
Six months inside a back-catalogue recovery: the writer, the gaps, and the claim that settled in ninety-one days.
The anatomy of a manufactured chart week.
A coordinated bot campaign has a fingerprint in the raw data. Streaming counts are only the first layer.
2,562 breakouts surfaced. How many were acted on?
The window between a genuine organic breakout and a commercial response is shrinking. Most artists with momentum signatures have no infrastructure to capitalise on them.
The Eastern European streaming anomaly: a case study in geographic fraud.
Streaming fraud is not random. It clusters geographically and operationally. A composite case showing how a coordinated playlist network generates high play counts with zero legitimate engagement.
Why your artist's TikTok spike will not appear in next month's streaming statement.
The conversion rate from social virality to DSP streaming revenue is poorly understood, consistently overstated, and structurally lagged. Most artists and managers are not aware.
Touring still follows streaming geography. Labels are still ignoring it.
In a significant number of markets, streaming data signals meaningful live demand that booking agents are not acting on. The gap is measurable.
How a distributor's ISRC block becomes your fraud exposure.
ISRCs issued within the same registration block can be exploited to mask artificial streams across a catalogue. Most labels do not understand the issuance chain - therefore cannot identify the attack vector.
The estate that did not know it owned half the song.
A 1970s co-write, a deceased writer, a publisher acquisition in 2004, and three conflicting society registrations. A significant royalty balance uncollected for over a decade.
CWR: the registration format that has been breaking royalties since 1999.
A significant percentage of CWR transactions contain errors that cause royalties to fail silently. Accepted by societies but matched to the wrong work, the wrong writer, or no work at all.
Neighbouring rights are the most systematically underclaimed income stream in recorded music.
UK artists performing on recordings played in Germany, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia are owed money from three of the highest-paying neighbouring rights societies in the world. Most are not claiming it.
What a catalogue due diligence audit actually finds.
M&A diligence looks at what a catalogue has earned. It almost never looks at what it should have earned. A composite case showing the gap between acquisition model and royalty reality.
The ISWC-ISRC matching problem, measured.
Of the recordings in our reference corpus, a material percentage cannot be reliably linked to a registered work via ISWC-ISRC matching. No link means no royalty routing.
How this works.
Each piece begins with a deep-research pass against the public literature, then gets drafted by the desk that owns the question. Status pills flip from In research to Forthcoming to Published as pieces move down the pipeline. To receive new Field Notes by email when they post, drop us a line.