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Platform: a new kind of streaming service

Overview

Music streaming is broken. Artists are underpaid and discovery is driven by opaque algorithms favouring a small number of artists, labels and technology companies. In turn, the current model flattens culture and makes it impossible for the vast majority of artists to make a living. There is a lot of noise online that is highly critical of this system.

We believe we can build something better.

Platform is a new kind of music streaming service built on two core principles:

Artists should be paid directly and fairly.  
Artists earn from every listen — transparently and proportionally from total revenue. Revenue comes from paid subscribers and a clearly defined ad model that respects the listening experience.
Discovery should be powered by people, not algorithms.  
Fans follow trusted voices, write reviews, curate playlists, and broadcast radio shows. Artists rise organically. Discovery comes from a real community, it’s not engineered.

The ease for artists to share their music and get heard by dedicated fans means that they can thrive without labels or middlemen. With artists earning directly through Platform and owning all their own music, they don’t need to become mainstream or ‘go viral’ to survive. They can carve out their own space and listenership, receiving an income directly from their fans. We’re just a platform creating an ecosystem that redistributes the power to artists and fans.

We believe we can build something better.

Platform is a new kind of music streaming service built on two core principles:

Artists should be paid directly and fairly.  
Artists earn from every listen — transparently and proportionally from total revenue. Revenue comes from paid subscribers and a clearly defined ad model that respects the listening experience.
Discovery should be powered by people, not algorithms.  
Fans follow trusted voices, write reviews, curate playlists, and broadcast radio shows. Artists rise organically. Discovery comes from a real community, it’s not engineered.

We believe we can build something better.

Platform is a new kind of music streaming service built on two core principles:

Artists should be paid directly and fairly.  
Artists earn from every listen — transparently and proportionally from total revenue. Revenue comes from paid subscribers and a clearly defined ad model that respects the listening experience.
Discovery should be powered by people, not algorithms.  
Fans follow trusted voices, write reviews, curate playlists, and broadcast radio shows. Artists rise organically. Discovery comes from a real community, it’s not engineered.

We believe we can build something better.

Platform is a new kind of music streaming service built on two core principles:

Artists should be paid directly and fairly.  
Artists earn from every listen — transparently and proportionally from total revenue. Revenue comes from paid subscribers and a clearly defined ad model that respects the listening experience.
Discovery should be powered by people, not algorithms.  
Fans follow trusted voices, write reviews, curate playlists, and broadcast radio shows. Artists rise organically. Discovery comes from a real community, it’s not engineered.

How artists are paid

Artists uploading music must declare:

They own 100% of the rights to the recordings and compositions.
The music is not subject to an exclusive deal with a label or distributor.

Platform operates on a simple shared-revenue model:

Platform generates revenue from audio-only advertising (free-tier members) and paid subscriptions.
Platform’s revenue goes into a shared pool.
Platform takes a fixed cut (e.g. 30%) to cover operating costs — no hidden licensing deals, no middlemen, no shareholders.
The remaining 70% becomes the artist payout pool.
Artists are paid based on the proportion of total listening minutes they received that month.

Artists don’t have to guess how they’re doing. They are provided with a clear dashboard showing:

Total listening minutes (monthly)
Total minutes streamed
Percentage of all listening
Estimated and final payout
Regions, new followers, most active fans etc

Music discovery

We want to build a music culture that goes beyond one-way music consumption. By giving fans more ways to engage this is turn creates a richer ecosystem to search and find music. In more detail:

Fans have many ways to engage.  
We want to give real fans the capabilities to show their support for artists by commenting on songs or albums, writing reviews, curating sharable playlists and even hosting radio shows or podcasts. For the 10% of listeners who enjoy it, curation becomes a creative role — they’re tastemakers. Some voices carry weight and they can be followed by other fans.
Rich search functionality gives control to listeners.  
This enables finding music through various filters but also includes the ability to find fan content, for instance, most liked playlists by genre or highest played radio shows in a region, which means there are more ways for the activity of fans and listeners to influence what rises to the top.
As a listener starts to follow other fans and artists, their feed starts to populate.   
The difference is, instead of a faceless algorithm feeding you “recommended” tracks, you’re getting music through human networks — critics, friends, curators. There is still personalisation but it’s done through taste and trust rather than recommendations with an unknown source.
This makes space for subcultures and small scenes.  
The quiet majority of musicians who make brilliant work without mass reach start to find an audience.

How artists thrive

Many artists don’t want to run a business. They just want to make great music and find listeners who care. This platform is built to make the business side of music frictionless:

Artists are discovered through organic activity: playlisting, reviews, comments, radio-style broadcasts. If the music connects, it travels.
Uploading is simple and direct through the platform.
Artists can see total plays and earnings clearly on their dashboard.
Monetisation is built-in and instant from minute one. No minimum thresholds. The more they’re played, the more they earn.
Artists grow inside genre-specific and regional ecosystems built by listener activity. Large success within a small group equals a sustainable career in music.

It's not about teaching artists how to play the game. It’s about creating the infrastructure to let their music be heard by the right people.

Why we don’t need algorithms

Just because we have a technology, doesn’t mean we need to use it. Does it always serve our best interests? Recommendation systems are often framed as a gift to the listener. But in truth, they mostly serve the platforms themselves.

Why recommendation algorithms are problematic:

Flatten cultural diversity.   
They maximise retention, encourage endless passive listening, and reinforce what the algorithm has already learned to predict. The result is sameness.
Create filter bubbles.  
Listeners get stuck in repetitive loops, missing out on discovery beyond the mainstream.
Serve business interests.  
Algorithms prioritise music from major labels or tracks with biggest marketing budgets — not necessarily what fans truly want or what’s best artistically.
Lose human context.  
Music loses meaning and stories get buried — it becomes “endless music, zero context.”

Discovery is not a problem to be solved by software. It’s a social act.

Why existing platforms can’t do this

Spotify
Spotify’s model prioritises growth for its shareholders and has major label licensing agreements that demand market share. It uses algorithms to surface music to listeners that are optimised for meeting this demand on a global scale. As a result, they are gradually flattening culture and creating a system that disproportionately rewards already-famous artists,

SoundCloud
SoundCloud had the raw ingredients; allowing artists to upload directly and building an unsigned community. However, they suffer from having a bloated UX that has never been guided by a clear north star.

Bandcamp
Bandcamp has the right philosophy — artist-owned, community-driven, non-extractive. But it’s not a streaming-native platform, and its economics don’t scale beyond the most dedicated 1% of music fans. For most artists, Bandcamp can’t replace Spotify — it complements it. We're building a platform that can do both.

Challenges

No famous artists — at least initially
The reality is big-name artists — especially those with current label deals — won’t be here at launch. This means casual listeners may feel “this isn’t for me” at first glance. However, more akin to social media platforms, new scenes and micro-celebrities will emerge from within. Furthermore, early adopters know they’re here to help build something — this sense of participation is the draw.

More effort required for casual listeners
Without recommendation algorithms, discovery takes more effort. This could feel like friction. However, after an onboarding process where listeners can start following artists and fan activity based on their interests, they will start building a feed that serves only them, not unknown entities.

The quality may not be high enough
Without gatekeepers determining what appears on Platform, it could lead to widespread low-quality music and recordings. However, fans will surface the music that is high quality. Furthermore, the barrier to producing professional sounding audio is low enough for there to be an abundance of unsigned bands and artists that create high-quality music using home studios.

The revenue pool starts small
Achieving an ecosystem that supports a large number of artists will take time. That’s unavoidable. With the right launch and growth strategy we can ensure that we give listeners and artists a reason to stay until they start seeing the rewards. We want artists to feel like they are part of a shared mission.

Legal and rights complexities
Without record deals and labels we are trusting that people have ownership of their music. We would include clear upload terms, education for artists about ownership and existing contracts, an upload process that includes rights confirmation, as well as an easy takedown process for copyright complaints.

People gaming the system
A per-minute model can be gamed by long, empty tracks, “ambient spam” and people playing their own music on repeat. We would combat this with clear content standards, periodic audits, and monitoring listener behaviour.

Pre-launch growth strategy

In order to build momentum prior to a launch we will follow this path:

Launch a “Just artists & fans” manifesto campaign.
We’ll start spreading the word about our mission through sharable assets and build a microsite where artists can start signing up to join. We’ll seed a movement.
Manually onboard artists.
Personally invite 200–500 independent musicians, particularly looking for those who may have commented or been vocal about artist rights and fair pay or generally critical of the current system.
Start promoting artists.
We’ll invite artists to start adding music and content that will be discoverable and showcased on the microsite prior to the launch. This starts to promote some of the artists and helps entice more to join.
Activate a waitlist.
We don’t launch until we have a minimum number of people. Whilst waiting, they can start previewing music and have the ability to start contributing, growing the community.
Both artists and fans can share invites.
We want this to feel like a movement. Fans and artists are asked to share invites and become ambassadors for a shared mission.

In order to build momentum prior to a launch we will follow this path:

Launch a “Just artists & fans” manifesto campaign.
We’ll start spreading the word about our mission through sharable assets and build a microsite where artists can start signing up to join. We’ll seed a movement.
Manually onboard artists.
Personally invite 200–500 independent musicians, particularly looking for those who may have commented or been vocal about artist rights and fair pay or generally critical of the current system.The ease for artists to share their music and get heard by dedicated fans means that they can thrive without labels or middlemen. With artists earning directly through Platform and owning all their own music, they don’t need to become mainstream or ‘go viral’ to survive. They can carve out their own space and listenership, receiving an income directly from their fans. We’re just a platform creating an ecosystem that redistributes the power to artists and fans.

In order to build momentum prior to a launch we will follow this path:

Launch a “Just artists & fans” manifesto campaign.
We’ll start spreading the word about our mission through sharable assets and build a microsite where artists can start signing up to join. We’ll seed a movement.
Manually onboard artists.
Personally invite 200–500 independent musicians, particularly looking for those who may have commented or been vocal about artist rights and fair pay or generally critical of the current system.The ease for artists to share their music and get heard by dedicated fans means that they can thrive without labels or middlemen. With artists earning directly through Platform and owning all their own music, they don’t need to become mainstream or ‘go viral’ to survive. They can carve out their own space and listenership, receiving an income directly from their fans. We’re just a platform creating an ecosystem that redistributes the power to artists and fans.

In order to build momentum prior to a launch we will follow this path:

Launch a “Just artists & fans” manifesto campaign.
We’ll start spreading the word about our mission through sharable assets and build a microsite where artists can start signing up to join. We’ll seed a movement.
Manually onboard artists.
Personally invite 200–500 independent musicians, particularly looking for those who may have commented or been vocal about artist rights and fair pay or generally critical of the current system.The ease for artists to share their music and get heard by dedicated fans means that they can thrive without labels or middlemen. With artists earning directly through Platform and owning all their own music, they don’t need to become mainstream or ‘go viral’ to survive. They can carve out their own space and listenership, receiving an income directly from their fans. We’re just a platform creating an ecosystem that redistributes the power to artists and fans.

Future considerations

Direct fan support
Enabling artists to earn additional income through selling merchandise and including a tipping function.

Live streaming
We want artists to be able to express themselves any way they like. Platform should support video content as well and even live streams that could be gated or free, that’s determined by the artist.

Collectives
Groups of similar sounding artists could support each other by creating a collective. Artists could be invited to join and benefit from the instant exposure to new fans.

Community owned governance
Artist and fan councils could make suggestions and vote on improvements to Platform allowing them to directly shape how the service evolves.

The long-term goal is not just a new streaming platform — it’s a restructured music ecosystem.

hello@charlierosedesigner.co.uk