Last month on SNR
Two dollars of it went to us. The receipt says so — line by line, name by name, down to the cent. Nobody else will show you this, and it isn't because they can't build it.
$7/mo · lossless FLAC, not a premium tier · cancel anytime
ART.34
artists reached · 812 qualifying plays
Reached the artists
$5.00
71% of what you sent
An example receipt at $7/mo, not an average — there are no subscribers yet, so there is no average to print. The shape is real: listening is a power law, so the artist you played most takes about 23% of your pool and a one-off discovery takes about 0.6%. We never divide by 34.
The part everyone else hides
Spotify pools every subscription in a country and splits the pot by share of total streams. Your $7 lands in the same bucket as everyone else's, and it comes out the other side distributed by market share — so most of it pays the artists with the most plays on the service, whether or not you have ever heard of them.
We don't pool. Your $7 is yours. It is sealed, it is split between the artists you actually listened to, and when you play nothing it is carried forward rather than quietly becoming our revenue.
One pool. Every subscription, mixed together.
Split by share of total streams
Widths are illustrative. We don't have their books — nobody does, the deals are under NDA — so there are no numbers on these bars.
Nothing crosses a lane. Your streams can only ever dilute your own $5 — which is also why a bot farm makes no money here. A fraudster streaming their own uploads around the clock extracts exactly what they paid in, minus our cut.
The take rate
$7.00/mo
Slide it up and our cut caps at $5.00. That isn't generosity, it's the whole design — we take between $2 and $5, flat, and everything else goes to the artists you played.
We absorb the card fee (2.9% + $0.30) out of our own cut, not out of theirs. So at $7 we take $2.00 and actually keep $1.50 — and by $100 we're keeping $1.80. The number we quote caps at five dollars. The fee keeps taking a bigger slice of it.
71.4% of what you paid
28.6% of what you paid
21.4% of what you paid
Why Spotify can't copy this
Switching from pro-rata to user-centric payments moves money between rightsholders. Somebody earns less the day it ships — and every one of those somebodies has a signed contract that says the money is divided the old way. Each of them, in effect, holds a veto.
Deezer has been pushing user-centric payments in France for years and still can't get everyone to re-sign. This is not incompetence. It is what happens when a change requires unanimous consent from the parties it takes money from.
We have no legacy contracts. Nobody has to agree to anything, because there is nothing to renegotiate. That's the whole moat.
The same deadlock is why they can't show you a receipt: the label deals are under NDA, so they are structurally not allowed to tell you where your money went. We can, so we do — and once you've seen one, an app that won't show you one starts to look like a choice.
What we're holding right now
Live · no login
SNR is holding $12,953.53 on behalf of 327 artists. $8,173.02 is inside its 30-day hold; $4,780.51 is withdrawable now. None of it expires, and none of it ever becomes ours.
Three numbers you'd expect here, and why they're missing
Subscribers, total paid out, median per-stream rate. Subscriptions aren't live yet, so there has never been a pool to split and there is no month to report. When the first one closes, those figures publish here — the median with the full distribution behind it, not a marketing multiplier — and they'll keep publishing every month whether or not they flatter us.
Until then this page shows a lot of zeroes. That's the honest reading of the ledger, and we would rather print it than print an estimate.
We take between $2 and $5. Everything else goes to the artists.