BMAT backs new music streaming royalties calculator

The free-to-use tool helps users calculate royaltiy earnings generated from streams. It aims to empower musicians by enabling them to check if their payments match their plays. Artists can corroborate their estimated music royalties and see if all the dots in their royalty stream are connected, which is, that they correspond to what they are receiving.

Fans can also explore how much their favourite artists could be earning, and there is also an interactive game to find out which artists had more listeners in the current month. The tool is expected to bring transparency to digital platforms.

“There’s a growing awareness, I believe, that music today is much more than just bands recording and playing gigs,” Ferraté said. “That there’s a whole background of financial structures, people and companies, that goes beyond what we see on the surface.”

In August last year, US digital agency Coalesce, in collaboration with music manager Jordan Mattison, launched an online streaming royalty calculator for musicians called Good Splits. Ferraté suggests that his new tool could help debunk some myths about the industry and put things into perspective for those who may not have thought about this before.

He added: “I think that there is a lot of unnecessary opacity in the industry that doesn’t contribute to adding caché to the bands or anything. I generally believe that industries should be transparent, especially arts and music industries, where money, value and compensation are integral to the artistic project and the creative process. With political bands for example, or also rappers, trappers, and so on.”

BMAT says its mission has been to make sure that artists get what they deserve. “The royalties calculator is Gabi’s independent project,” BMAT communications manager Diana-Emilia Bolboacă told Music In Africa. “He told us about it, and we really liked it and decided to help him launch it, making available all our resources.”

BMAT says more is expected from the project. “Gabi is working on adding radio and TV data from BMAT’s vast database to improve the tool. He’s also ‘developing a chart exhibiting the most looked-up artists as well as delving into some cross-data results like aggregating countries or genres and contrasting them. We’ll be keeping an eye out.”

Interested users can check out predicted earnings on the royalties calculator here.