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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.