02/04/2026
*THE FOREST I HAD TO BUILD ALONE*
*On three years of streaming data, a broken industry, and why Stream Roots exists*
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There is a document on my screen that most people would glance at and dismiss. It's a DistroKid royalty export — hundreds of rows of data, each one representing a moment somewhere on earth where someone pressed play on something I made. A fraction of a cent from Norway. A fraction from Israel. From South Korea, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Poland, the United Arab Emirates. From countries I've never visited, whose languages I don't speak, whose audiences I've never stood in front of.
I built this alone. No label. No manager. No A&R. No co-sign. No friends driving the push, no family bankrolling the sessions. Just me, a catalog that now stretches past eighty original works, and a distribution pipeline I wired up myself.
This article is about what those numbers mean. Not just to me — but to every artist sitting on the other side of this same system, watching their music travel the world while the revenue it generates barely covers the cost of a coffee.
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**What the data actually shows**
Over two years into my third year as IR-Decstar, my music has been logged in over forty countries across every major streaming and sync platform: YouTube, Apple Music, TikTok, Amazon, Tidal, Pandora, Anghami, NetEase, Tencent, Luna, LyricFind. Platforms most independent artists never reach. My track *"I'm Going Deep"* alone generated royalty entries from GB, US, PL, NO, RO, DE, FR, JP, KR, CA, AU, BR, ZA, IL, IN, TR, AE — and more. Organically. Without a campaign. Without a team.
And yet, the earnings per line read like coordinates on a microscope slide. 0.00059642. 0.11118933. 0.61465375 — that last one, the largest single entry in the entire report, was from the United Kingdom via YouTube Ads. Less than a dollar. For what the algorithm processed as thousands of impressions.
This isn't a complaint. It's evidence.
