Chief Creative Office
For the Record
Narrative, expose and the human story.
The Chief Creative Office publishes the piece that tells you what happened. Named phenomena, composite case histories, and the decisions people actually had to make - written first-hand, for artists and the people who manage them.
Published under this masthead.
No. 029How bot streaming is jeopardising the future of music.
Streaming data has become the currency of modern music. An argument for why artificial streams are fraud rather than clever marketing, and what a real audience actually looks like.
The music industry does not recognise people. It recognises data - and that is why royalties sit in Suspense.
Identity matching is one of the least understood and most important parts of the modern music business. How four spellings of the same name become four different people, and what an identity map does about it.
Duplicate-upload royalty hijacking: criminals are no longer chasing streams. They're chasing master recordings.
Streaming fraud has moved upstream. A forensic read on duplicate-upload royalty hijacking, and why the master recording, not the stream, is the asset under attack.
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.
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.
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Market sizing, commercial consequence, and the money on the table.
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Controls, screening method, and what a team should actually do.
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Identifiers, matching, standards, and the failures nobody sees.
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