How the Money Works at SOUND

A plain-language companion to SOUND’s Mission Articles. The charter is the binding text; this page just explains it.

One sentence. You pay your subscription, we pay the people who keep the platform running, and everything left over goes to artists. No profit is skimmed off the top. Here is exactly how the “everything left over” gets calculated and split, and how you can check it yourself.

Where the money goes, in order

1. The money comes in.

A subscription is $10.99 a month, or $129 for a year. Every subscription dollar SOUND collects in a month goes into one pot. That is the starting number, published in full.

Paying yearly is cheaper for a reason worth explaining, because it is the same argument as the rest of this page. Card processing costs a percentage plus a flat fee on every single charge. The flat fee is $0.30, which on a $10.99 payment is 2.7% by itself, nearly as much as the percentage rate. Billed monthly, processing your subscription costs about $7.42 a year. Billed once, about $4.12. We hand most of that saving back as the lower price, and the rest goes into the Artist Pool with everything else. Processing is one of our largest costs, behind only salaries, and none of it reaches a musician.

2. Songwriters get paid first, by law.

A fixed share (currently 15.3%) is owed to the performing-rights and mechanical organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and the Mechanical Licensing Collective) that pay songwriters and publishers. SOUND keeps none of it; it passes straight through and comes off the top.

3. The bills get paid, itemized.

Salaries, servers, legal, the CPA, payment processing, every operating cost is listed by category in the monthly report. Nothing lumped together, nothing hidden. Salaries are the largest line, so what SOUND pays its own people is set out below.

4. A one-month safety buffer.

SOUND holds back enough to cover one month of operating costs, as a one-time cushion so the platform cannot be knocked over by a bad month. It is built once, not re-taken from artists every month.

How the Artist Pool gets split

This is the part most platforms get wrong. Your subscription goes to the artists you actually listened to, not into a giant shared pool that pays superstars you never played. If all of your listening this month went to three local bands, your slice of the pool goes to those three bands, divided by how much you played each. This is a user-centric model, and most platforms do not do it.

If you paid but streamed nothing this month, your fee does not vanish and it does not go to the biggest artists, it is shared across every artist in proportion to their plays, and shown as its own line in the report.

Founding artists get a small, fair edge. Artists who join in the first six months carry a permanent 1.05x weighting, but only inside each listener’s own split. If you played a founding artist and a newer one, the founding artist’s share of your fee is nudged up slightly. It never takes a cent from another artist or from the pool; it simply recognizes the people who took the risk early.

And you are paid from your very first stream. There is no follower count to hit, no yearly-stream minimum and no minimum number of listeners to reach before your plays start earning, one honest listen counts. Most platforms make the smallest artists earn nothing until they cross a bar; SOUND does not, because in a user-centric model paying a small artist costs no other artist a cent. We are generous about popularity and strict only about authenticity: a play counts once it reaches the standard 30-second mark, and the bots, fake plays and account-sharing ruled out under our published fraud methodology never count at all.

The “per-stream rate” you will see published is an average, a way to watch the number rise as we grow. It is not the payout mechanism. No one is paid a flat global rate; the real math is the user-centric split above.

It always adds up. Every artist’s payment is rounded to whole cents so that the payouts sum to the Artist Pool exactly. The software refuses to produce a result if the numbers do not reconcile to the penny.

What we pay ourselves

Those salaries come out of your subscription before the Artist Pool is calculated, so you are entitled to see them. Every one of them is published by role, every year.

A floor set to a real cost of living.

No full-time salary at SOUND falls below 150% of a local living-wage benchmark, the MIT Living Wage Calculator in the United States, for the county where the employee lives. That floor currently puts the lowest full-time salary at about $72,000. Nobody here has to wonder whether the work covers the rent.

Ranges published by role.

Every position has a salary range, and every range is listed in the monthly public report, from the entry roles near the floor up to the two chief roles at $175,000 to $200,000. Pay at SOUND is not a secret you negotiate alone in a closed room; it is written down where the whole team and the whole public can see it.

Benefits, and a 32-hour week.

Full-time employees get employer-paid health insurance, disability coverage, paid time off and a retirement plan, the same standard benefits for everyone, the founder included. The standard work week is 32 hours. Good work comes from people who still have lives, not from people worn down. There are no stock options and no equity grants for anyone, because SOUND cannot be sold and there is no exit windfall to dangle. The team is fully remote.

The founder is capped, on purpose.

The founder is paid a salary of $200,000, adjusted each year for inflation, and nothing else. No equity premium, no profit distribution, no bonus, no exit package. That salary is capped at no more than three times the lowest full-time salary at SOUND; at today’s floor the real figure is about 2.8 times. The point is plain: the person at the top cannot quietly pull away from the people the company depends on. If the floor rises, the ceiling rises with it, and only then. The cap is written permanently into the charter (Mission Article VIII), where it can be made stricter but never loosened, by any vote, for any founder, ever.

Why you can trust this

The exact code that does all of this is open-source, public on GitHub from launch. The monthly report says “trust us.” The open-source engine says “verify it yourself.” The second one is the one that matters. The salary ranges sit in that same monthly report, and the founder’s pay is disclosed by name, not just by role.