A play is a unit. A unit is a share of what came in.
The royalty engine does not promise a fixed rate per play. It counts units, measures what the pool actually holds, and divides one by the other at the close of the period. Nothing is owed that was not collected first.
A common question from artists encountering the platform for the first time is: what is a play worth. The honest answer — and the one the royalty engine is built to give — is that a play is worth a share of what came in. Not more. Not a fixed figure promised in advance. A share.
How the share is calculated
- Every qualifying play becomes one unit in the period's ledger.
- Every licence fee, subscription share, and ad-revenue contribution collected in the period funds the period's pool.
- At the close of the period, the pool is divided by the total units to produce the per-unit rate for that period.
- Each rights-holder is paid their unit count multiplied by the per-unit rate, settled into the WikiGlue wallet.
Why this is the honest number
Most streaming platforms publish a per-play rate. The number circulates, artists plan against it, and at the end of the year the arithmetic quietly does not work — because the rate is not the rate the platform promised, it is the rate that happens to emerge after billions of plays divide against a billion dollars. The promise was the scaffolding. The ledger is the building.
The GlueArrow engine does not build the scaffolding first. It does not quote a per-stream rate on the website. It counts units as they accrue, it measures the pool as it fills, and it produces the rate when both sides are known. An empty pool produces a rate of zero — which is the correct answer, because nothing was collected to distribute.
What this changes for the artist
The statement an artist receives is no longer an IOU written against a hypothetical rate. It is the arithmetic of the period: here is the pool, here are the units, here is the share, here is the wallet entry. An artist can walk the statement back to the ledger and see the deposits that funded it, line by line.
What this changes for the platform
The platform cannot promise money it has not collected. Every distribution is a function of revenue already in the pool. The settlement runs on a kill-switch that defaults to off until a pool is funded — not because the engine is fragile, but because the standard is to pay from money that exists, and to say so when it does not.
“A play is a unit. A unit is a share of what came in. Nothing is owed that was not collected first.”