Rekon is one person in Antwerpen.
My name is Ryan Kane. I build and run Rekon — the royalty scanner, the 41 registration guides, the split-sheet system, and everything written on this site. The support address goes to me, and I answer it myself.
Rekon exists because royalty income is fragmented by design. It arrives from different organisations, in different territories, on different schedules, and none of them tell you what you are not collecting. An estimated $2.5 billion sits unclaimed every year in what the industry calls the Black Box — money that cannot be paid out because ownership cannot be matched (source: Intelmarket Research Report). Almost none of that is recoverable by reading a statement harder. It needs someone to check the registration side, which is the part nobody sends you a notification about.
Why I built this
My best friend Danny — he releases as Gusted — had a song go viral. "Jet Plane" was suddenly playing in countries neither of us had ever been to, and the honest answer to "are you getting paid for all of this?" was that nobody knew. Not him, not me. Money was arriving from some places and not from others, and there was no way to tell which was which without unpicking a dozen organisations by hand.
That is the whole reason Rekon exists. Not to squeeze more out of a catalogue, but to take the business-side dread out of releasing internationally — so that "am I collecting everything?" is a question you can answer in an afternoon instead of one you quietly carry around.
I have been in the techno and trance scene for over five years, in Colorado and in Europe. That is where most of what I know about this came from — not from a rights course, but from watching artists I know put records out and then try to work out where the money went.
What I have written here
The strongest thing I can tell you about my qualifications is that you can check them. This is the reference material on this site, all of it researched, sourced and dated:
- 41society registration guides
Step-by-step registration for PROs, mechanical bodies and neighbouring rights societies worldwide — fees, timings, the eligibility rules that disqualify people, and the mistake most often made at each step.
Read one →- 10platform payment guides
How each streaming service and store actually pays: the payment model, an estimated rate stated as a range, and exactly what you have to register for to collect all of it.
See them →- 6royalty type guides
What each of the six royalty types is, who collects it, and why it goes unclaimed.
See them →- 5guides by role
The royalty picture for producers, songwriters, small labels, managers and DJs — and the one stream each of those roles most reliably leaves behind.
See them →
The standards this site is held to
Most of what is written about music royalties online is marketing with a number invented to make it land. These are the rules I hold this site to, and they are written into the source files themselves so that whoever edits them next inherits them.
Every page carries the date it was last verified
Royalty rules change. A page that does not tell you how old it is cannot be judged, so each one states when its facts were last checked — and the source data files carry a "re-verify before editing" instruction to whoever edits them next.
No average-recovery figure, ever
Rekon does not publish a "the average artist recovers €X" number, because how much you are owed depends entirely on your catalogue and where you are registered. The scanner produces a deliberately conservative range from your own inputs, and says plainly that the answer may be lower, or nothing.
Per-stream rates are stated as estimates, with ranges
No major platform except Apple Music publishes an exact per-stream rate, and every figure varies by listener territory, subscription tier and your own distribution deal. So every rate on this site is written as an estimate with a range. A stale number stated as fact is a worse problem than a wide range stated honestly.
Competitors are only written about after being checked
Comparison pages exist only for competitors whose live sites, pricing and coverage were actually reviewed. Four other named competitors were left unwritten rather than guessed at — an unverified comparison is just an assertion about somebody else's business.
What Rekon does not do is stated as plainly as what it does
Rekon finds gaps and shows you the fix. It does not register works on your behalf, collect on your behalf, or take a percentage of anything. There is a page listing the limits explicitly, because the limits are what tell you whether the tool is right for you.
Corrections get made
If something here is wrong, email it and it gets fixed and re-dated. That address reaches one person, and it is the same person who wrote the page.
Why Antwerpen matters
Rekon is built in Belgium, and that shows up in the coverage. Most royalty tooling is written from the United States outward, which is why guidance for SABAM, SENA, BUMA/STEMRA, GEMA, GVL and their neighbours is usually a sentence long or missing entirely — while the artists who need it are dealing with three societies, two languages and a mandate rule nobody explained. Those are the guides I started with, because they are the ones I could not find anywhere else.
Get in touch
Corrections, questions, or something on this site that is wrong — send it over. It reaches me directly.
See what your own catalogue is missing.
Sign up free