The Money Tools

Just want to know what the gig paid? Five calculators and nothing else, for anyone who wants the maths without the guesswork, including the number most people in music put off working out until the money has already gone.

The five tools

• Streaming royalties. What your streams pay across the platforms, with Spotify's 1,000-stream floor built in.
• Ad returns. What a spend brought back, and what it would need to break even.
• Gig break-even. How many tickets the night has to sell.
• Merch margins. What a shirt makes once the shirt is paid for.
• The Gig P&L. What one show paid, once everything is in. Its own file, so you can keep one per show.

What comes with every edition

Two files, five tools. Every rate is a cell you edit, checked against the market in 2026 rather than recycled from an old blog post.

Is this you yet

The whole money layer already sits inside The Manager & Label and The Lot, so take this if you want the maths on its own. There's no worked example and no companion; these are working tabs only.

The details

• Real spreadsheet formulas, not a pretty database. Change one number and the rest answers back. Works in Excel, Google Sheets and Apple Numbers.
• Will you use it? It's built for the first twenty minutes. Open it, fill in the light grey cells on four tabs, then look up. Every workbook comes with a worked example filled in end to end, so you're never starting from a blank page.
• Picked the wrong edition? We swap it free, whenever you notice. Changed your mind? Full refund within 14 days, no interrogation. Or buy up any time and pay only the difference, because your downloads page credits what you already paid. Refunds, plainly.
• Kept current. Rates and references get re-checked through the year, and your link always serves the latest version.
• One purchase covers your team: you, the artists you work with, and the people inside your projects. Copy it per campaign and per artist. Don't resell it or post it publicly; it's priced so you don't have to.

Questions people ask

What's not in it?
The plan. No campaign calendar, no content planner, no pitching. If you want the plan around the maths, The Artist runs the whole campaign.

Isn't this just a template?
A template is blank and passive. This carries a worked example and a sample project, so you see normal numbers before you type your own, and the notes explain why each one matters.

Do I need to be a marketer?
No. The writing is plain English and it teaches the few terms worth knowing as you go. Every tab has hover notes written for someone with no marketing background.

Is it a course?
No. Nothing to complete, no modules, no videos to get through. A course teaches you things; this does the work with you.

A spreadsheet, in 2026?
A spreadsheet, on purpose. The maths has to run itself, and a database that looks nice can't do that. It opens in Excel, Google Sheets or Apple Numbers, and the first open takes a moment while the formulas compute.

We're In Cahoots. These are working tools for independent music, written down so you can run them yourself.