Experience the Future of SOUND
“We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.”
— Arthur O'Shaughnessy
My parents grounded me for two weeks for letting a friend listen to Appetite for Destruction.
My parents had Beatles records. They had Simon & Garfunkel. My dad loved the Beach Boys, but only the surfer stuff, not Pet Sounds or Friends. He loved country. Willie Nelson, Hank Williams, Jr., the Oak Ridge Boys, Marty Robbins, The Highwaymen, Conway Twitty and Charlie Daniels, and he came to have a solid crush on Shania Twain. We watched Hee Haw and The Muppet Show, Friday Night Lights, Solid Gold, Star Search, The Tonight Show, Letterman and Saturday Night Live. I watched the world premiere of Thriller on my grandparents' 13-inch television; my grandfather kept Duke Ellington on constant rotation. I got my own first real music from Columbia House (12 cassettes for a penny!) — Duran Duran, Tears for Fears, Simply Red, whatever was dominating mainstream MTV at the time.
The first request I ever made to a radio station was for “What I Like About You” by the Romantics.
Then I found metal and punk and classic rock. I woke up for school at six one morning to Def Leppard's “Foolin'” on the radio and knew it was going to be a good day. Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica, Dirty Rotten Imbeciles. Hüsker Dü, Pink Floyd, The Accused, The Sex Pistols (my first cat was named for Sid Vicious), Van Halen, AC/DC, Slayer, Motörhead, The Beastie Boys. In addition to tuning into Monty Python, The Young Ones, Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes every week, I received a different kind of education by watching The Song Remains the Same, The Wall and the Heavy Metal movie again and again and again.
My first concert was the Rolling Stones on the Steel Wheels tour with Living Colour at Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky. That was the first time I smelled marijuana smoke. My second was Metallica at Louisville Gardens for ...And Justice for All with The Cult. I started going to local shows in high school — Kinghorse, undermine, Evergreen, Oblong Box, Rodin, Crain, Sunspring, Dybbuk, Cinderblock, Erchint and Sancred; the Louisville scene at that time was bristling with creative fury.
I was 16 when Nevermind came out. I already knew about Nirvana because an older kid at school told me I should check out Bleach the year before. Then Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Tool, Faith No More and Mr. Bungle, but also King Crimson, Yes, Rush, the Doors, The Misfits, Black Flag, Rush, Fugazi, the Dead Milkmen, Minor Threat, Bad Brains, Al Di Meola, Jean-Luc Ponty, Bartók, Chopin and Mozart.
I swam at the same quarry off Old Henry Road that Slint did.
I had my car towed in Columbus, Ohio, for parking illegally to see Dinosaur Jr. at the Newport Music Hall — then walked 16 blocks with my girlfriend and her friend — both on acid; I was driving — to retrieve it from a shady tow lot with our last $60. One of the best shows I have ever seen was Don Caballero at a tiny bar in Columbia, Missouri. A Prince cover band's rendition of “Purple Rain” on Beale Street in Memphis reduced me to tears. I destroyed my gorgeous, electric blue '87 Honda Prelude with 5-star MSWs on a two-week odyssey — Louisville to Noblesville to Chicago to Detroit to Windsor to Toronto to Niagara Falls to Buffalo — eating grilled cheese and sleeping in fields and parking lots to see Phish, a band I didn't even really like, without tickets. We got a miracle at Darien Lake — just outside Buffalo — and saw Ken Kesey on stage in a sequined Uncle Sam costume.
I was in a band from about the age of 20 to 25. We made some music I liked. I got to live a piece of the fantasy — the shows, the roar, putting everything you have into every note and hoping your voice doesn't break, the feeling that the music you made might matter to someone in a room who doesn't know you yet. That feeling is real. It is worth protecting.
I worked at a venue in Louisville called The Rudyard Kipling, so my band played there often. One night I bought a CD from a band out of Bloomington, Indiana, called Little Joe Gould. I don't have it anymore. The songs are on YouTube — unclaimed, unmonetized, just floating there. The band isn't making a cent from any plays. They went on to become Murder by Death, and I'm glad that they seem to be doing all right.
First, I carried cassettes everywhere. Then books of CDs, but they were fragile. Still, when MP3s arrived, I could fit 600 songs on a single disc, and I thought it was the greatest invention of the 20th century. Then the iPod came out — finally, no more lugging physical media around. I did Napster. I did the torrents. When streaming arrived, I subscribed because it was convenient, and it felt like the right thing to do. Now I collect vinyl. I wish I had never given any of my physical media up, but there were times when I needed the money.
Right now, I am listening to Russian Circles, Pelican, Deerhoof, Squid, Midlake, Aldous Harding, Dry Cleaning and black midi. These are not household names, but the music is extraordinary — and everyone who made it earns fractions of a cent per stream on platforms that treat them as content.
THE PROBLEM
The problem has been documented for years. Artists knew. Advocates published the numbers. Nobody changed anything. I knew it was bad — I just hadn't sat with exactly how bad until I watched a video by Drew Gooden about how streaming services pay artists. It included an interview with one of the founders of a major platform — a man who was making $10 billion from something he didn't care about. It wouldn't have mattered to him if he were selling soap or herbal weight loss pills. The expression on his face was that of a person who's getting away with something and knows it.
This was not an oversight. It was a design.
The platform he built paid the musicians whose work made the whole thing possible between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream. A million streams — more than most working musicians will ever reach — earns somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000. The label takes its cut before that number exists. The publisher takes the statutory mechanical. What reaches the artist is an insult that has been laundered through enough process that it becomes hard to point at exactly where the theft occurred. That's not an accident either.
No public accounting of where the money goes. Algorithmic playlists that can be influenced by who pays for placement. AI-generated content flooding the catalog, competing for the same fractional pool with human beings who made actual songs. Bots inflating stream counts to steal from that pool. And the founder keeps smirking because his machinations are working exactly as intended.
The people who made what shaped me — every record that got me through something, every show that made me feel less alone — they deserved better than this. So does everyone who is making music right now.
WHAT I AM BUILDING
SOUND is a music streaming service. Our creed is:
You pay $10.99 a month. We pay the people who work here. Everything left goes to artists.
The subscription price may rise. If it does, it will be because the cost of honoring our commitments — to artists, to employees, to the infrastructure that keeps the platform running — requires it. Not to increase margins. Not to reward investors. There are no investors to reward. The price is a function of our obligations, nothing else.
Every month, we publish a complete accounting of every dollar in and every dollar out — every salary, every infrastructure bill, every legal fee, itemized, reviewed by an independent CPA and posted publicly at a URL that requires no login and no payment to read. The money remaining after all of that is the artist pool, and your subscription goes to the artists you actually listened to, not into one pot split across everyone. We publish the resulting per-stream rate so you can watch it. It goes up as we grow. It is never capped.
The software that calculates how much each artist earns is open-source. Not “available upon request.” Public, on GitHub, from the day we launch. Any artist, any journalist, any skeptic can read the exact code that distributes the money. The monthly report says trust us. The open-source engine says verify it yourself. Both matter. The second one matters more.
Merch is sold at actual cost — what it costs to print the shirt plus the payment processing fee. We keep nothing. Fans can tip artists directly; the tip goes to the artist minus the actual Stripe fee, nothing else. Fan club subscriptions are priced by the artist; SOUND keeps only what the transaction costs to process.
The artists who join in the first six months get a permanent 1.05x multiplier on their streams — every one of their streams counts as 1.05 when a listener's fee is divided among the artists that listener played, for as long as their catalog is here. They are taking a risk on something unproven. That deserves to mean something in real money, permanently.
With a small subscriber base and a full catalog, the per-stream rate at launch will be low — possibly lower than what you're earning on existing platforms right now. What I can tell you is that the number is real, it is public and it goes up every time we get a new subscriber. There is no management cut taken before it exists. There is no label position diluting the pool. Every subscriber we add makes the rate better. That is the only direction it moves.
The people who work here earn enough to actually live on — at minimum, 150% of a credible local living-wage benchmark for wherever they are: the MIT Living Wage Calculator in the U.S., and a comparable independent benchmark elsewhere, reviewed every January. We publish that number, too. SOUND will not force its employees to get a second job to make ends meet. They get full health coverage, disability insurance and a retirement plan with an employer match — and when someone who works here gets sick, we carry them. That is what the insurance is for.
The people who work here work 32 hours a week. Not as a perk — as a policy. The expectations are not lower. Deadlines are real. The platform does not go down. There are no acceptable hacks, leaks or breaches — not one, ever. The work gets done, and it gets done right. The design is just that it gets done in 32 hours, by a team that is rested enough to do it well. For roles that require someone to be awake at 3 a.m. — operations, security, infrastructure — we staff shifts rather than asking one person to be always on. We will hire the people it takes to keep everything working as it should. Overwork is not a value here. Rest is not a reward for finishing; it is part of the design.
I take a salary, not a fortune. No cut of the artist pool, no exit windfall, no equity to cash out. The only way to send artists the most money is to stop skimming it on the way, so I don't. That is not a sacrifice I am asking you to admire. It is the mechanism. It is how the math works.
WHAT WE WILL NEVER DO
We will never run an ad.
Not one. Not ever. Not “just a small one to cover costs.” Not for any amount of money.
We will never allow anyone to pay for placement.
Placement on SOUND is earned by listeners choosing to play something. That is the only mechanism, forever.
We will never host AI-generated music.
Human beings make things that other human beings genuinely want to hear. We are not going to dilute that pool.
We will never offer a free tier.
SOUND requires an active paid subscription. A free tier means the platform optimizes for users who are not paying — because they are the product being sold to advertisers. If you are not paying, you are not the customer. Everyone who uses SOUND pays. Everyone who pays is the customer, and that is who we build for.
We will never give a record label an ownership stake.
That arrangement — built into Spotify from the beginning — created permanent conflicts of interest between the platform and the artists it was supposed to serve. Not here.
We will never be sold.
If SOUND comes to the end of its life, it closes. It does not get absorbed into something that strips out what it stood for and keeps the subscriber list. SOUND's Mission Articles make this legally binding.
FOR THE PEOPLE WHO MAKE MUSIC
I know what it is to be in a band and not know if it matters. I know what it costs — not just money, though it costs money — to make something and put it in front of people and wait to find out if any of it lands.
I also know what music did for me as a listener. Every one of those moments was made possible by a person who wanted to make music and kept doing it even when the math didn't work.
The math has never worked. That is what I want to fix. Not as a charity. Not as a favor. As the actual design of the business.
This is the rock and roll dream I hope to make a reality.
THE INVITATION
This is for people who love music, and for the people who make it. That is the whole audience. If all you want is the cheapest way to play a song, that is fine — it is not us. But if you love music and you think the people who make it should get paid, you are exactly who I built this for.
If you make music and you are tired of the math not adding up — SOUND is being built for you. Come in early. The Founding Artist multiplier is real and it's permanent.
If you listen to music — SOUND is also a different experience than what you have now. No ads. The playlist you're listening to is one you or another human curated, not an algorithm optimizing for label payments. The catalog is music made by human beings, not AI-generated filler accumulating streams next to it. And when you play something, you will know exactly what the artist earned — the accounting is public, posted every month, no login required. $10.99 a month to actually support the music you love instead of just consuming it.
If you want to argue with something I've gotten wrong — I want to hear it. This is a first draft of a company, not a finished thing. The only part that isn't a draft is my commitment.
Mark Esser
Founder, SOUND
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