Rap Ledger
Nobody tells you what the paperwork actually costs.
Split sheets, distributor fees, publishing, release timing: the unglamorous half of putting music out. Written by someone who releases his own records rather than someone selling a course about it.
Open the split sheet calculator What distribution really costsFree tools
The things you end up doing in a Notes app at 2am. These run entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Split sheet calculator
Add everyone in the room, split the writing and the master, see instantly if it adds to 100%. Prints to a signable document.
LiveDistributor cost calculator
Enter what you release and what you earn. It ranks DistroKid, TuneCore, CD Baby and UnitedMasters by what they actually cost you, including the cuts they don't advertise.
Live · for listenersWhere your subscription goes
The listener-side counterpart. Pro-rata explained with your own numbers in it.
LiveBeat licence decoder
You leased a beat. Work out what you actually bought, how close the song is to breaching the stream cap, and when the licence runs out.
LiveRelease timeline builder
Pick a drop date and get the whole schedule backwards from it with real dates, including the seven-day pitch deadline you cannot move.
The numbers
Dated, sourced, corrected in public
Dated, sourced, and corrected on the page when they change.
What music distribution actually costs in 2026
Four distributors, the real annual cost at 1, 4 and 12 releases a year, plus the social-media royalty cut that doesn't appear on the pricing page.
ReferenceThe plain-English glossary
Every term on this site defined without jargon, with the expensive misunderstanding named under each one.
ProcessThe first-release checklist
Everything that has to exist before you hit distribute, in the order it has to exist. Includes the four things that are painful to fix afterwards.
Why this desk exists
There is an enormous amount of hip hop media covering who is beefing with whom, and almost none covering the fact that your distributor quietly takes 20% of your TikTok money. The creative side of independent rap is over-served, while the administrative side, the part that decides whether you keep your money, is barely covered at all.
Rap Ledger is the second one. Every number here is dated and sourced, taken from the company's own page rather than a comparison site. When something changes, the page changes and says so, and the figures that turned out to be wrong stay listed in the receipts index with the date they moved.