The access audit · Musicians
Streaming made the audience visible and the relationship invisible. You can see how many people heard it and have no idea how many of them would follow you anywhere.
Two questions · free · nothing you enter about your routes leaves your browser
Every route that brings attention to your work is one of three things, and two questions asked in order tell you which.
When someone shows up here, had they already chosen you?
If no, stop. The route is contested and question two does not apply. Coordinates you hold for people who never chose you are not a direct route.
Could you reach them again without this intermediary choosing you again?
Yes is direct. No is rented. Ordinary infrastructure you can replace does not count as a landlord.
Sorted by the two questions. Yours will differ — this is the shape of the reasoning, not a verdict on your career.
The listener did not choose you. The system placed you, and it can stop.
A curator chose you and lent you their audience's trust. They control the slot.
Real conferral, and it belongs to whoever holds the audience relationship.
Reach won in the moment against everything else competing for the same seconds.
You can start the next contact, and you could move providers without starting over.
They chose you and would find you again somewhere else.
Excellent leverage, entirely at the discretion of a music supervisor.
Their standing transferred to you for the length of the release.
The audience is real and the trust is real. It was extended to the curator, and you are borrowing it. If the curator moves on, the audience mostly stays with them.
The audit places a route. It does not price one. For anything that came out rented — in this field that is usually the platform, curator or label carrying your volume — the next questions are:
Independent artists are increasingly moving toward direct-to-fan platforms to hold the relationship. That is the second question being answered deliberately rather than by default.
It places your routes. It does not measure your career. It cannot see the quality of your work, your income, your craft, your credits or your reputation — and rented routes build all of those, even when they build no way back to anyone.
The underlying idea — that attention arrives contested, rented or direct — is free to use, adapt and teach. If this is wrong about your situation, that is worth more to me than if it is right: the contact is on the about page.