The deadlock

Paying artists from the subscriptions of the people who actually listened to them is not a hard engineering problem. It is a straightforward accounting method any competent streaming team could implement in a quarter. Several services have already built it.

It has not shipped, and the reason is not technical.

Switching from pro-rata to user-centric moves money. It is the same pot: some rightsholders earn more the day it lands and some earn less, and the ones who earn less are — by construction — the ones who currently earn the most. Each of them signed a contract that says the money is divided the old way. Changing it requires them to sign a new one.

So every party who would lose has a veto, and they are being asked to use it on themselves. Deezer has been pushing this in France for years and still can't get everyone to re-sign. That isn't incompetence, and it isn't cowardice. It is what unanimous consent looks like when the change takes money from the people whose consent you need.

The same knot holds the receipt. They can't show you where your money went because the deals that decide where it went are under NDA — the confidentiality is not a policy they chose, it is a term they agreed to, and it binds them whether or not anyone at the company would rather be honest with you.

This is the whole opportunity, and it is the only one that matters: we have nothing to renegotiate. No back catalogue, no majors, no legacy contracts, nobody to ask. The advantage isn't that we're better people. It's that we're new, and being new is a structural asset with a shelf life — which is exactly why it should be spent on the thing that cannot be retrofitted later.

So: your subscription is a sealed pool. It pays the artists you played, in proportion to how much you played them. We take between $2 and $5. On the first of the month you get an itemised list of names and amounts, and you can check our arithmetic.

None of that is generosity, and we'd rather you didn't read it as any. It is what a company with no contracts to defend does when it wants to be hard to copy. The right thing and the defensible thing happen to be the same object here — and that is the only reason to trust it, because a promise that costs nothing to break is not a promise, it's a mood.

The day this gets expensive to keep is the day you find out whether it was true. That's why the numbers are published monthly, and why they'll keep publishing in the months they make us look bad. A commitment nobody can audit is a slogan.