How It Works

Open Music uses a user-centric payout model — a fundamentally different approach to how subscription revenue reaches artists compared to traditional streaming platforms.

The problem with pro-rata

Most platforms (Spotify, Apple Music, etc.) use a pro-rata model:

1. All subscription revenue is pooled into one big pot.
2. The pot is divided by total global streams across all users.
3. Each stream gets the same fraction of a cent, regardless of who listened.

This means a listener who only plays indie jazz is still funding pop megastars — because those megastars have billions of streams pulling from the same pool. The indie jazz artist sees almost nothing, even though they have a dedicated listener paying $10/month.

User-centric: your money, your artists

Open Music flips this model:

1. Each listener's subscription is treated individually.
2. 90% ($9 of a $10 subscription) goes to artist payouts.
3. That $9 is divided among the artists that specific listener played, proportional to their listening time.

Example

Say you listen to three artists this month:

| Artist | Your listening time | Their share of your $9 | |--------|-------------------|----------------------| | Artist A | 60% | $5.40 | | Artist B | 30% | $2.70 | | Artist C | 10% | $0.90 |

Artist A gets $5.40 from your subscription alone — not a fraction of a cent from a global pool. Multiply that across all of Artist A's listeners, and you get a fair, transparent income that scales with real fan engagement.

Why this matters

• Small artists earn more. A niche artist with 500 dedicated listeners earns proportionally from each one, instead of competing against billion-stream acts for pool share.
• Listeners have impact. Your subscription directly funds the music you choose. You're not subsidizing artists you never play.
• Transparency is built in. Artists see per-listener, per-track breakdowns. Listeners see where their subscription went each month.

The 10% platform fee

The remaining 10% ($1 of a $10 subscription) covers platform operating costs: hosting, storage, bandwidth, payment processing, and development. Open Music is not venture-funded and does not extract profit. The goal is sustainability, not growth-at-all-costs.

As the platform scales and costs-per-user decrease, the artist share may increase. All financial decisions are made transparently.