The invention is a business method for calculating royalty owner rights—specifically, calculating a metric of use corresponding to an aspect of royalty owner interest in an aggregate multi-royalty owned electronic content. In one embodiment, a large number of users, on the Internet, download or otherwise have access to a large collection of popular music. Even though some percentage of these users may never reconnect to the Internet in such a way as to facilitate sending an actual use report of listening from the collection, nevertheless a statistically significant number of the users will provide subsequent reporting, and this is sufficient to allow a metric of actual use to be computed for use in a royalty owner rights distribution event.