Jay-Z relaunched his Tidal streaming service the other day, and it's gotten a huge amount of press. With 12 A-list superstar music "investor" artists, on the surface it looks like a play for the 1% to make more money. You can read a lot more about this on my Forbes blog.

But there's a lot more to it than that and there's a lot more to streaming royalties that most people, even superstars, don't seem to know. That's what this month's newsletter is all about.

Every artist on the planet is complaining about the meager royalties they receive from streaming music, but there's actually a lot of money being made. It's just not trickling down to the artists.

1. Streaming payouts are apples and oranges. There are actually 4 different kinds of streams and they each pay at a different rate. For radio-like streaming from a service like Pandora, there's a free tier and paid tier royalty, with the paid tier resulting in a lot higher royalty. For on-demand streaming from the likes of Spotify, there's also 2 tiers but they pay at a much higher rate than the radio-like services.

That's why it's really difficult to say exactly how much a stream pays. While the figures are mandated for radio-like streams, they're not for the higher paying interactive streams. The figures given out in the press are just averages.

2. But they're paid on a sliding scale sometimes. The real secret in streaming royalties is that not all streams are equal. They're based on a sliding scale of popularity and demand. That means that Beyonce will make slightly more per stream that Death Cab For Cutie, because the demand for her music is higher.

3. The label takes most of the money. The streaming services pay the record labels, who then pay the artists. This is where most of the money goes. If the artist is lucky, he makes 25% of the royalties received, but it's probably a lot less than that in far too many instances. And if the artist owes the label money for recording or tour support, it's deducted first before the artist sees it.

4. Even the publishers get paid by the labels. The Music Publishers Association made a really bad deal in the beginning of the digital music revolution back in 2002 by letting the record labels collect all the publishing money from streaming, then paying it back to the publishers, instead of the publishers collecting it themselves.

Record labels are notorious for "unconventional" accounting, so who knows how much the publishers, and therefore the songwriters, should really be making.

Then there's the fact that there's only around 10 million streaming subscribers in the U.S. right now. Most industry analysts (including me) expect that to rise to 50 million soon, and may grow even larger than that. 

That means that eventually there's going to be a lot more money in the streaming business, and artists and songwriters will see their income rise quite a bit.