Source
Where did this come from?
Who wrote the term, and how good the record of it is. Ranked S1 for the primary document down to S6, which means nobody has checked.
Three lenses · one deal at a time
Read the deal before you sign it.
Label Lens asks the same five questions of any music agreement, scores it on what its own terms actually say, and shows you the source for every line. It has no opinion it cannot cite, and it refuses rather than guesses.
Serving the music is essentially free. Nothing about the economics of streaming is driven by the cost of streaming — the rate is a licensing and market-power outcome, not cost recovery.
Three questions, asked of everything
Power
Who holds the power here?
Five components: what share reaches the artist, who controls access, whether there is a right to audit, what leaving costs, and what the other side may do with the work afterward. This is the lens the scores below are built on.
Path
What happens next?
The one next action, how long it takes, whether it can be undone, and what it closes off. A path that forecloses something says so.
The library
Seven agreements, scored on published terms. The score is an average over the components that were actually read, weighted by how much each one matters, with severity taken as the worst single component rather than a sum — so one catastrophic clause cannot be diluted by four ordinary ones.
A blank component is not a passing grade. It means the clause has not been read, it is excluded from the score, and the card says how many of the five were read.
Compare two deals
Side by side, component by component. Where one side is unread the row says so rather than declaring a winner.
Score your own deal
Answer only what the agreement in front of you actually says. Every question has an it doesn't say option, and choosing it is the right answer when the document is silent — silence is a finding, not a gap to be filled in.
This runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere, stored, or logged — there is no server to send it to.
In The Booth · Session 07 · facilitated
Would I Sign This?
They leave with
Run of show
Start the clock when the first person sits down. The block that is running is highlighted; the rest stay readable, because a facilitator needs to see what is coming and not only what is now.
00:00
not started
Opening script
Read aloud by a young person, from the card, at 5–12 minutes. It is quoted here in full and unedited so the printed copy and the screen cannot drift apart.
Discussion
Write the verdict
At 50–57 minutes. Pick one, and name what it forecloses. A verdict without the foreclosure is a preference; with it, it is a decision.
The arithmetic
How many plays it takes to earn what one direct sale earns. Move the amount and watch the two numbers separate.
Streaming figures use the industry-wide independent-artist rate of $3.00 per 1,000 streams (Duetti), before any distributor's cut, and only for tracks that already cleared the 1,000-stream floor (Loud & Clear). Streaming is where people find you. It is not where anyone gets paid.
What Label Lens will not say
The strongest version of this argument is not the popular version. Four claims are available, sound persuasive, and are not used here.
How good is the record?
Every term in the library is tagged with where it came from. The ladder runs from the document itself down to nobody having checked, and the bottom rung is the honest default.