A royalty is a fraction of a penny that arrives six months late. That is the music business in one sentence. You write a song. Somebody plays the song. Six months later a check arrives and the check says you earned eleven cents. Eleven cents for a song that a thousand people heard. That is a royalty. That is the reward for making something out of nothing.

I received royalty checks from Elektra Records. I received royalty checks from Orange Records. I received royalty checks from Apple Records. Every check was an insult disguised as a payment. The check said we played your record and here is your share and your share is less than the cost of the stamp they used to mail the check. The stamp cost more than the royalty. The envelope cost more than the royalty. The accountant who calculated the royalty cost more than the royalty. The entire system exists to pay musicians less than the cost of telling them how little they earned.

The street has no royalty system. When you play on the corner the payment is immediate. A coin hits the hat and the transaction is complete. No accountant. No six-month delay. No statement with seventeen deductions you do not understand. No recoupment clause that means they subtract everything they spent before you see a dime. The hat is the most honest payment system in the history of music. The coin goes in. The musician picks it up. Done.

Streaming made it worse. A third of a penny per play. I did a rant about that. A third of a penny. You need three plays to earn one cent. You need three thousand plays to earn ten dollars. You need three million plays to earn ten thousand dollars. And ten thousand dollars is not enough to live in New York City for two months. Three million people listened to your song and you cannot make rent. That is not a royalty. That is a rounding error with a direct deposit.

The word royalty means a payment to a king. That tells you everything you need to know about who the music business thinks is the king. The king is not the musician. The king is the label. The king is the distributor. The king is the platform. The musician is the person who made the thing the king sells and the musician gets the fraction and the king gets the whole number. That has not changed in a hundred years. The technology changed. The fraction did not.

I am dead and I still earn royalties. Somewhere a computer is calculating what fraction of a penny my estate earned this quarter from somebody streaming The Pope Smokes Dope in a coffee shop in Berlin. The check will arrive six months from now and it will not cover the cost of opening the envelope. But the song is still playing. The song does not care about the royalty. The song cares about the ear. The royalty is what happens when somebody puts a price on the distance between a song and an ear. The song travels for free. The royalty is the toll booth on a road nobody built.