[ Update: head to patrontape.com and complete the onboarding form for an invite ]
Music streaming isn’t working.
This past year many of us have been thinking more critically about our music streaming subscriptions. Artists and music industry workers have organised, unionised and become more vocal on what is, ultimately, a rubbish deal for them. For every “wrapped” playlist we shared to celebrate the art we love so dearly at a time we needed it most, there was also a stark reminder of the extraordinarily small fraction paid to the creatives who actually made the work.
And in the shadow of curated playlists by the mega platforms who dominate streaming, aimed at aligning with our aspirations and political causes, we know there are thousands of marginalised artists struggling with the unreasonable pressures and shrinking financial prospects brought about by those same companies.
All the while, immense resources are instead employed on converting our billions of collective streams into behavioural insights to be commodified and repurposed in feeding the insatiable demands of the adtech industry¹. All of this without even considering patforms’ dubious financial relationships (see Spotify’s defence startup funding²) and artists who feel strongly enough about the perils of misinformation in their podcast libraries to stage a digital walk-out³.
In a time when our connection to music was largely limited to the digital domain, were we to rely solely on Bandcamp Fridays⁴ to support those musicians whose touring schedules disappeared into the ether? Were we simply making donations to fund the work we ostensibly pay for all year round on larger platforms?
When we have to make a special case, sell outmoded downloads and clear old merch boxes to fund art we rely on so heavily to bind us as humans, to maintain our mental and physical wellbeing, to find hope and experience real joy — that’s a sure a sign that the existing system is broken.
It’s a broken system that has been a source of frustration for much of my life as a fan of independent music. Many of my fondest memories are time spent tucked into the corners of dusty makeshift performance spaces, dumb struck over bizarrely gifted musicians from down the road⁵, bittered only by the knowledge that the pursuit of their art comes with a financial burden and a mountain to climb to reach a point of self-sustainability.
All those years ago, the seed of an idea for another kind of streaming service was born, and it spurred me on to learn to code and began my career in software development for the music industry.
What I write here is an invitation to the independent musician, label, fan, technologist, interested party of any kind, to be a part of building a better subscription music streaming service that actually works for all of us. A project to see us out of this drab amnesty in which we’ve been quietly beholden to the whims of emergent market leaders, and do our own thing instead.
Patrontape
Patrontape is a strictly independent, not for profit platform commons on which artists earn a fair deal from their streaming audience.
Listeners pledge adjustable pay-what-you-feel subscriptions shared among artists and other rights holders based on their listening time — sometimes referred to as a User Centric Payment System⁶ — and are finally provided with a platform which feels genuinely connected to their real world experience of music fandom.
Audio is served over a distributed network on IPFS⁷ (a new peer to peer protocol) reducing dependency on shady digital monopolies, and technical development is community led and responsive to the needs of the independent music community and its supporters.
That’s the high level overview, here’s some detail on how that will work in practice:
Platform commons — Not for profit
The addition of more profiteering stakeholders in a creative industry, where margins are already extremely tight, places creatives on an inexorable path to exploitation. Streaming’s unfair revenue sharing agreements is an inevitable symptom of an industry which, in a bid to protect itself from ever diminishing profits, has ensured that musicians and independents will foot the bill.
I want to make the vital intermediary between artist and listener work differently, and extract nothing from the exchange.
There is a predictable cost to the technological infrastructure of a music streaming service, and this needs to be recouped from subscriptions. But such a service doesn’t need to be run for profit. When profit isn’t the goal, why should it?
The goal is to protect the culture.
Inspired by the important writings of thinkers like Kate Raworth⁸ and Mariana Mazzucato⁹, and in keeping with the spirit of the web, its early visionaries and thriving open source communities, patrontape is designed as a not for profit “platform commons”.
It is more important than ever to carve out alternatives to growth-obsessed digital monopolies, skewing our creativity ever deeper down the rabbit hole of financialisation, and there’s much more to be said on how a good platform could be structured, but in short, what I mean by platform commons, is this:
- The service is free and open to all musicians to share their music and earn fair revenue directly from listeners, at zero cost.
- The team building and maintaining the platform can be thought of as custodians, taking from subscriptions only what is necessary to respond to the needs of the community and build a great music streaming platform.
I am fortunate to have experience working with large libraries of music, which helps in projecting the cost of the web, mobile and desktop services on a measured trajectory of growing use. An attainable baseline goal would be a 20% cut of subscriptions (around 10% — 15% less than major services take¹⁰), to be regularly revisited through consultation, with any excess donated to causes voted for by artists and listeners.
Why is this important?
It’s important for artists, listeners, all of us, to have an alternative. Something that exists outside of the systems that so often fail us. Many of us see our life in music as an escape into a world which is collaborative, caring and safe. But when we stream music, the available options appear competitive, expolitative and precarious.
A not for profit model frees the service from the pressures of shareholders who have a vested interest in particular aspects of the industry, and of measuring up to endless growth metrics set by financiers — this process in itself incurring a substantial cost in time and resources.
Per Subscription Payout System
Perhaps because of its conceptual obscurity (so, stay with me here) the injustice of the aggregate-style “revenue sharing” of mainstream services is something only gathering attention in recent times.
Listeners are often surprised and bewildered to discover that their subscription, before reaching rightsholders, goes into a huge pool of total revenue. This pool is then divided out among the entire network of artists based on their share of total streams, not based on any artist’s share of an individual subscription.
Whether you listened to the most popular artists this month or not, the lion’s share of your money still goes to them (or their labels, more often than not¹¹).
Why does this matter?
It leaves you with far less agency to dictate how your financial contribution to music effects the creatives you care about. Diligent streaming of an independent artist might translate to a hundreth of a penny’s worth of movement up the charts, but they should, by rights, be owed a fair share of the subscription you paid in good faith.
So patrontape payments have been designed the right way. A listener pledges a monthly subscription, and at the end of each month that subscription is split between the artists and labels owed revenue for the music listened to, based on the time that listener spent with it.
Finally, payments are made directly to connected accounts — no third party distributors. Artists should not have to pay to earn, or await arduous reporting processes. The moment money leaves a listener’s account, the shares are transferred to artists who can then redeem their payouts as they see fit.
Pay what you feel
It works¹²! Bandcamp, widely adopted by independent artists and labels, introduced a model which proved a revelation for digital music. Like a “for the bands” bucket paraded around the room by an eager DIY promoter, it has proved without a shadow of doubt the nascent desire to pay more than the bare minimum — and at scale.
But sadly, there is only so far a largely download-centric system can help in a time when such a format is long since outdated; an entire generation apart from the widely accepted norm of all access monthly music subscriptions.
The price of that subscription, though, has been stagnant for years, and it’s yet another drastically limiting factor preventing the model from working for most artists. So it makes good sense to introduce the pay what you feel model to streaming, so that it too can flourish in the way downloads once did.
Why use flexible pricing?
Because no two music fans are the same. A pay what you feel subscription allows users to adjust their price to reflect:
- Supplementary use with a mainstream service. A small contribution is still extremely valuable to those handful of artists getting their share of it.
- The growth of the library. While there’s less music available, we shouldn’t expect a high price for being first in.
- Individual Budgets. Many of us, particularly in the arts, have experienced fluctuations of financial stability, and know that there are times when the minimum is all we have.
This way, subscriptions are flexible enough to sustain a service with a growing library, with all parties benefiting from the reliability of recurring payments. A reasonable minimum ensures everyone is contributing at least a little, while still giving fans the agency to dedicate an amount they choose to the music they care about.
It’s worth noting that outside of streaming, artists are already leveraging this kind of tiered financial contribution among supporters — making a variety of formats, deluxe editions, merchandise, subscriptions and crowdfunding options available. Music lovers take pride in engaging with these, but streaming remains a single price affair, where their individual support is lost in the void.
Ethical Tech and the IPFS
One of many hard learned lessons of the past decade is that digital platforms have far more nuanced effects than their utopian intentions suggest; throwing into question our democracies and civil liberties, and amplifying preexisting power dynamics of global wealth inequality. Maybe most sadly, leaving people feeling more disconnected than ever.
It’s with this in mind that a platform for the independent music community, one that has historically been at the vanguard of progressive change and an agitator for justice, should make careful technological decisions about how we work, what we aim for, and what third parties we work with.
This means casting aside old metrics of success which funnel masses of users towards viral and branded content, aimed at generating insights to sell to advertisers, and instead opting for simpler goals, asking more important questions: Are we discovering music? Do creatives feel that they are getting a fair deal? Are we improving things?
Decentralization
My earliest vision of a new music streaming service was a wholly decentralized one. I’ve since come to see that ideas rooted in technological optimism don’t always meet up to the above standards — a crypto coin or NFT based approach, for example, just isn’t viable for most musicians, not to mention its disastrous environmental impact.
But there is one emerging technology that can be instrumental and deployed right now, offering a level of decentralization, and one I’ve put into use in building our beta.
The IPFS⁷, to put it in its simplest terms, is the distributed web. It is a means to access and share content (files, web pages, in this case audio) peer to peer over a growing network of nodes — you can run an IPFS peer at home and serve some files right now.
It means artists on patrontape can be hosts of their own audio. Users access it through a combination of centralized and distributed nodes and traditional HTTP gateways, and in future we’d want listeners apps to be able to perform some level of “pinning” — a peer making a file available to neighbouring users. Taking this idea further, studios, venues and industry hubs could support their scene in the digital realm by running peers, creating important points of strength in the network.
It’s an efficient way to share files and a novel way to build a distributed network of music. Such a network should be more energy, resource and cost efficient, and reflective of real world connections and musc scenes. IPFS is an open source project too, which keeps the platform from becoming reliant on a monopolistc cloud service provider like Amazon or Google¹³.
So, all of that said…
How can I help fix music streaming?
Here’s a few quick links to get you on board!
- onboarding — to register your interest
- patrontape.com — our homepage
- our discord server — help us build and plan
- hello@patrontape.com — get in touch!
Development of the service, app and web apps is well underway, and we’re now focused on reaching out to early adopters to begin using our Artists Beta.
We’re very interested to hear from anyone curious about joining or supporting the project, whether that’s as a developer or UI designer, assisting in the administration and management of the project or representing your grassroots music scene and helping build the community.
Following the Artists Beta, which allows us to open a dialogue with artists and build a library of music, we will begin to batch onboard listeners in rounds of invitations to our mobile and desktop apps.
About the author
You’ve been reading the words of me, Tom, a music fan.
I’m from Derby, an unassuming little city in the very middle of the middle of the UK. I release music as Tom John Hall and founded Year Of Glad, a label and collective of good friends who support eachother’s art and try to support charities and local community causes while we’re at it, too.
I’m also a software developer, I work with a lovely company providing web services for production music libraries. I’ve worked on an award winning ios app and use a variety of languages to build services at scale. I want to use whatever time, resources and skills I have available to do something right for the music I love.
