Negotiating Your Booking Deal (Beyond the Guarantee)
The guarantee is the headline number. The actual money in a touring deal lives in backend percentage, hard-merch carve-outs, and the rider line items most artists never negotiate.
Read playbook →Tier · Major · 4 playbooks
Playbooks for the major artist.
Major is the tier of global rollouts and label-major budgets — coordinated campaigns across six regions, sync placements queued months ahead, the team is twenty people. The plays that matter here are operational: how to keep a campaign coherent across timezones, language markets, and platform algorithms. These playbooks distill what we see when the stakes are eight figures.
- Audience
- 500k+ monthly listeners
- Budget
- $100k+ / release
- Team
- 20+ across label + camp
- KPI
- Regional chart velocity
- Momentum window
- 6-month global rollout
- Primary lever
- Sync + coordinated drops
Curated
Where to start
- Established Playbook Play 002 · 6 min
Negotiating Your Booking Deal (Beyond the Guarantee)
The guarantee is the headline number. The actual money in a touring deal lives in backend percentage, hard-merch carve-outs, and the rider line items most artists never negotiate.
- touring
- representation
- Established Playbook Play 003 · 7 min
Selling Your Catalog vs. Holding
Catalog sale multiples have settled in the 10-18x range. Whether that math beats holding depends on three numbers — your discount rate, your tax position, and whether the catalog is still growing.
- representation
- release-strategy
- Established Playbook Play 004 · 6 min
The Catalog Audit
A catalog audit is the once-a-year exercise of identifying which old songs are still earning, which are silently dragging, and which deserve a refresh budget. The framework, scored by save-rate per song.
- release-strategy
- marketing
By topic
Plays grouped by what they teach
- Established Playbook Play 001 · 6 min
Negotiating Your Booking Deal (Beyond the Guarantee)
The guarantee is the headline number. The actual money in a touring deal lives in backend percentage, hard-merch carve-outs, and the rider line items most artists never negotiate.
- touring
- representation
- Established Playbook Play 002 · 7 min
Selling Your Catalog vs. Holding
Catalog sale multiples have settled in the 10-18x range. Whether that math beats holding depends on three numbers — your discount rate, your tax position, and whether the catalog is still growing.
- representation
- release-strategy
- Established Playbook Play 001 · 7 min
Selling Your Catalog vs. Holding
Catalog sale multiples have settled in the 10-18x range. Whether that math beats holding depends on three numbers — your discount rate, your tax position, and whether the catalog is still growing.
- representation
- release-strategy
- Established Playbook Play 002 · 6 min
The Catalog Audit
A catalog audit is the once-a-year exercise of identifying which old songs are still earning, which are silently dragging, and which deserve a refresh budget. The framework, scored by save-rate per song.
- release-strategy
- marketing
- Established Playbook Play 003 · 7 min
The Drake Method
Drake's between-album activity is the playbook. How major artists feed platform algorithms continuously to keep catalog hot for a decade.
- release-strategy
- marketing
- Established Playbook Play 001 · 6 min
The Catalog Audit
A catalog audit is the once-a-year exercise of identifying which old songs are still earning, which are silently dragging, and which deserve a refresh budget. The framework, scored by save-rate per song.
- release-strategy
- marketing
- Established Playbook Play 002 · 7 min
The Drake Method
Drake's between-album activity is the playbook. How major artists feed platform algorithms continuously to keep catalog hot for a decade.
- release-strategy
- marketing