Backstage: Music Business

Understand who gets paid when your song plays: composition and master, royalties, publishing, distribution, contracts. 50 short lessons, no account, works offline.

Backstage teaches the part of the job you do not learn in the studio: how the music business actually works.

This is not a production or songwriting course. It is 50 short lessons on rights, money and contracts, built as a game: a path of lessons, hearts, a daily streak, XP, gems and crowns. Five-minute sessions, designed to stick.

WHAT YOU WILL UNDERSTAND

12 sections. Eight explain the business and four are craft, one per role:

1. How the business works — the two halves of every song, the composition and the master, and why each has a different owner and different money.
2. Rights and ownership — what you own, how long it lasts and what you can hand over.
3. Royalties and statements — the four kinds of royalty and how to read a statement without getting lost.
4. Publishing and publishers — collecting societies, work registration and what a publisher actually does.
5. Digital distribution — identifiers, metadata, deliveries and the contract you sign with a distributor.
6. Labels and contracts — reading a deal before you sign it: advance, recoupment, territory, term.
7. Audience and algorithms — playlists, data and growth you cannot buy.
8. Sync, live and merch — the income that does not depend on the algorithm.
9. Shipping a release — the calendar backwards, the budget and how to read the first week.
10. The deal with your manager — what it commissions, the sunset ladder and what to ask if they are also your label.
11. Splits and registration — the split sheet, the two halves of your share and why the money jams.
12. The numbers of live work — your budget and not the promoter one, your own show and the sync pitch.

CHOOSE WHERE YOU START

Five tracks — full course, artist, manager, songwriter, live and sync — that reorder the sections around what you do. None of them hides anything: all twelve are in every track, and you can switch whenever you like without losing what you finished.

Finish the 50 lessons and the app generates a PDF certificate with your name and your crowns. It is made on your phone: no account and no connection needed.

HOW YOU LEARN

350 hand-written exercises: short theory, multiple choice, true or false, fill in the blank, matching concepts and ordering steps.

Getting it wrong is not skippable. The exercise goes back to the end of the queue and does not count as solved until you get it right, and it also lands in the Practice tab. Each lesson is mastered in three passes: three crowns.

The daily streak and the XP goal exist so you come back tomorrow. You can drop the goal to 20 XP whenever you want.

FOR SELF-MANAGED MUSICIANS

The vocabulary is the one you will meet in a contract or in your distributor's dashboard. The examples are independent-artist examples: who registers the composition, what happens when a label pays for the recording, what you are agreeing to when you take an advance.

This is educational material, not legal, tax or financial advice. Market figures are presented as common ranges and vary by territory. A contract gets reviewed by a specialist lawyer. The names of collecting societies and platforms are mentioned for informational purposes only.

YOUR PROGRESS IS YOURS

• No account and no sign-in. • No collection of personal data, of any kind. • No backend of our own: XP, streak, crowns and achievements live on your phone. • No analytics and no trackers. • No third-party ads. • No in-app purchases. Gems are earned by playing. • Works offline.

The only links out of the app are two at the bottom of Profile: naeku.io to distribute your music and ytrocket.com to promote it, both from the same team that makes Backstage. They are a suggestion, never a requirement: they open in your browser only if you tap them, they unlock nothing in the app, and Backstage sends them nothing about you.

The flip side: if you uninstall the app, your progress goes with it. There is no copy anywhere, because there is no anywhere.

Start with lesson 1 and find out who gets paid when your song plays.