Narrative
A fee is not income.
Consider an independent artist offered the slot they have been chasing: a place at a UK summer festival. Not the headliner (not yet) but a real slot, on a real stage, in front of thousands of people.
The fee sounds like a yes. But the number that matters is what the artist actually keeps after the agent's commission, the van hire, crew, and rental, and that number looks very different. Reading the gap between the fee and the net is the whole job here.