Somewhere in a Universal Music spreadsheet, there’s a number with my name next to it. And actually my song-writing partners.

£300,000.

That’s what the system says I owe. Not because I borrowed it. Not because anyone handed me a cheque for three hundred grand. But because that’s how major label deals have always worked, and almost nobody outside the industry understands quite how strange that is.

How you end up owing a fortune for making music

For anyone who hasn’t lived it, here’s the short version. A label signs you. They advance some money and they spend a lot more on your behalf: recording, videos, marketing, the machine. Then every penny of that gets charged back against your royalties. You don’t see real money until all of it is paid off. That’s called recoupment, and most artists never get there.

So you can release records. You can have them played, streamed, loved. And you can still be sitting on a six-figure balance that says you’re in the red, watching revenue flow past you towards everyone except the person who actually made the thing.

That was the deal. For decades, those were the only terms on the table, because the label owned the means of production. The studios, the distribution, the radio relationships, the capital. If you wanted in, you signed, and you accepted that the odds were stacked from day one.

Now look at the world we’re actually in

Here’s why that number feels so absurd to me now.

A teenager can make a release-ready record in a bedroom on a laptop that costs less than a month’s rent. Distribution to every platform on earth is a few clicks and a small fee. The gatekept, capital-heavy world that justified those brutal deals has been quietly dismantled, piece by piece, by technology.

And yet the legal framework underneath the music business hasn’t moved. The model that put me £300k in the hole still shapes how deals get done, because the alternative, doing it fairly and formally, has always been too expensive and too complicated for independent artists to reach.

Then add the next wave. AI tools trained on creative work, generating revenue somewhere down the line, with no mechanism to send a fair share back to the people whose work made it possible. If we carry the old logic forward, we already know who loses. The same people who always lose. The creators.

A different bet

I think the fix isn’t to rage against the labels (though some days, three hundred grand makes that tempting). The fix is to build the thing that should have existed all along: a way for independent creators to do fair, legally binding deals without needing a label’s capital or a lawyer’s retainer.

Deals where revenue is shared, not clawed back. Where every collaborator has a stake in the success they help create. Where the agreement is set up in minutes, on your phone, the moment the work happens, and where nobody ends up £300k in debt for the crime of being talented and ambitious.

That’s what we’re building with revflo. Shared outcomes instead of recoupment. Partnership instead of a balance sheet that treats the artist as a liability.

The point

I don’t tell the £300k story for sympathy. I tell it because it’s a perfect snapshot of a model that made sense in 1999 and makes no sense at all today, yet still quietly governs how creative people get paid.

The tools to make and share work have been democratised. The deals haven’t. That’s the gap. And closing it, fairly, is the whole point.

revflo is launching soon. If you make things, or look after the people who do, register your interest.