How the money moves
There are two ways to split subscription money between artists. Almost everyone uses the first one. The difference is not a detail — it decides who gets paid, and it decides whether a bot farm is a business.
One — pro-rata
Everyone's money in one bucket.
The service collects every subscription in a market, takes its cut, and divides what's left by share of total streams. If an artist accounts for 1% of all streams that month, they get 1% of the pot — of everyone's pot, including yours, including the pot of people who have never played them.
Now one subscriber starts streaming 5,000 times a month instead of 800. They paid the same $7. The pot did not grow — but the denominator did.
Before
pot ÷ total streams = the per-stream rate everybody is paid at
After
same pot ÷ a bigger number = everyone earns less
Every artist on the platform has taken a pay cut, including the ones that heavy listener has never heard of. Pro-rata socialises the cost of a power user across the whole roster. It is also why a stream farm pays: the fraudster's streams come out of everyone's rate, so the money they extract is other people's.
Two — user-centric, which is what we do
Your $7 is a pool of one.
We never mix your subscription with anyone else's. We take our cut off your $7, and the rest is split between the artists you streamed, in proportion to how much you streamed them. Then we send you the list.
- You pay $7.00
- We keep $2-$5, flat $2.00
- Your pool, split across the artists you played $5.00
- Played nothing? Deferred, then distributed, never ours Every cent
Your streams can only ever dilute your own $5. Stream 5,000 times and you have not touched anybody else's rate — you have spread your own five dollars thinner, over artists you chose. That is the whole difference, and it is one sentence long.
If a subscriber goes quiet
What happens when you stop listening.
Someone subscribed, streamed for a few months, and then disappeared. Their subscription is still billing — where does that money land? The pool is sealed to them, but there are no new plays to divide it among.
Month 1 — defer
The pool sits unallocated. Maybe they're on holiday. Maybe they'll be back next month. Their receipt shows the full amount untouched, and a month of silence is not a crime.
Months 2 & 3 — distribute
They're probably not coming back. The pool is split among the artists they already listened to, weighted by their total qualified plays over the last six months — not just one month, and not just the latest. Silence becomes a final act of generosity: the audience they already built gets the money.
Month 4 — cancel
We stop charging them. At this point the historical data is too stale — distributing money to artists someone listened to five months ago is sentiment, not arithmetic. The subscription is cancelled, and the pipeline ends.
If the subscriber never listened to anything — not a single qualified play, across any month — the pool sits unallocated until they do. Or until they cancel. There are no historical artists to distribute to, and guessing is worse than waiting.
The same mechanism, from the other end
A bot farm here is a business that loses money.
Stream fraud works by streaming into a pool other people funded. Ours isn't. To extract money from SNR you first have to put money into SNR — a subscription, on a card, at $7 a month — and then all the round-the-clock streaming in the world will return you, at most, your own $5. Minus our $2. Minus the card fee.
The fraud is a rounding error and it's a rounding error against the fraudster. We did not build an anti-fraud system. We built a pool that a fraudster has no reason to attack, which is a better anti-fraud system than the one we would have built.
Stolen cards are the one exception, so payouts sit in a 30-day hold before they're withdrawable — long enough for a chargeback to land while the money is still here rather than after the artist has taken it out.
What a split actually looks like
It's a power law. We never divide by 40.
A typical subscriber plays 700–900 streams a month across about 40 artists. If you divided $5 by 40 you'd get twelve and a half cents each, and that's not how anyone listens. Your top artist eats most of your month.
| Rank in your month | Share of your pool | They receive |
|---|---|---|
| #1 artist | ~23% | $1.15 |
| #2 | ~12% | $0.60 |
| #5 | ~5% | $0.25 |
| #10 | ~2% | $0.10 |
| #40 — a one-off discovery | ~0.6% | $0.03 |
On a $5 pool, at $7/mo. There is no fixed per-stream rate under this model — it's your pool divided by your streams, so it's different for every subscriber, every month. Anyone quoting you a single per-stream number is quoting you an average of things that aren't alike.
If you pay more
Our cut caps at $5. Everything above it reaches artists.
We take 20% of what you pay, capped between $2 and $5. At $7 that's $2.00; it climbs to $5.00 at $25 and stops there. We absorb the card fee (2.9% + $0.30) out of our own cut, not out of the artists' share.
With one limit, and we'd rather you hear it from us. The fee grows with the payment and our take caps at $5, so past ~$160 the fee exceeds it. The difference is charged to you and itemized — $0.17 of a $30 subscription under the old model, nothing under the new one until well past a normal subscription.
| You pay | To artists | We take | ↳ card fee | ↳ we absorb | ↳ charged to you | ↳ we actually keep |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $7.00 | $5.00 | $2.00 (28.6%) | −$0.50 | $0.50 | — | $1.50 (21.4%) |
| $20.00 | $16.00 | $4.00 (20.0%) | −$0.88 | $0.88 | — | $3.12 (15.6%) |
| $30.00 | $25.00 | $5.00 (16.7%) | −$1.17 | $1.17 | — | $3.83 (12.8%) |
| $100.00 | $95.00 | $5.00 (5.0%) | −$3.20 | $3.20 | — | $1.80 (1.8%) |
The first two money columns add up to what you paid. That is the entire split, and there is no third slice. The last two are what happens to our take: we charge 20%, capped between $2 and $5. At $7 we actually keep 21.4%; at $25 the cap kicks in. Above that, every dollar reaches artists in full.
One more rule worth knowing
An album you own doesn't cost your pool anything.
Buy an album and you already paid that artist directly — so when you play it, those plays are excluded from the split. Your $5 goes to the artists you haven't paid yet. Buying a record you love makes your subscription fund discovery instead of paying the same person twice, which means buying is an act of generosity rather than a substitute for one.
And it's yours: unlimited streaming, a lossless FLAC download, or point any Subsonic client at it. We don't lock up what you bought.