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
Watch Drew Gooden’s video “The Music Industry is Broken” on YouTube.
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 had made billions 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 out of that number. 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, deserved better than this. So does everyone who is making music right now.
WHAT I AM BUILDING
SOUND is a music streaming service. Here’s the creed:
You pay $11.99 a month. We pay the people who work here. Everything left goes to artists.
The price might go up someday. If it does, it’ll be because what we owe people costs more: artists, employees, the servers that keep the thing running. Not to pad a margin. Not to pay an investor, because there aren’t any. The price is what our obligations add up to, and nothing else.
Every month we’ll publish the whole accounting. Every dollar in, every dollar out. Salaries, every server bill, every legal fee, itemized, reviewed by an independent CPA, posted at a URL that doesn’t ask you to log in or pay a cent. Whatever’s left after all that is the artist pool, and your subscription goes to the artists you actually played, not into one pot that gets split across everybody. We’ll publish the per-stream rate so you can watch it, and nothing in the charter caps it.
The code that decides what each artist earns will be open-source. Not “available on request.” Public, on GitHub, from the day we launch. Any artist, any journalist, anybody who thinks I’m lying can read the exact math that moves the money. The monthly report asks you to trust us. The open-source engine will tell you to go check. Both matter. The second one matters more.
An artist prices their own merch. We show it and pass your order to them or their print shop, and we keep nothing. The artist keeps the rest. Fan clubs are priced by the artist, and we keep only what the transaction costs to run. The one thing we mark up is our own merch, the gear with the SOUND logo on it. It ships free and still lands a little under what the same stuff runs elsewhere, and the margin funds the reserve. It never touches the artist pool or the per-stream rate, and we itemize it in the monthly accounting like everything else.
Artists who join in the first six months keep a 1.05x multiplier on their streams for as long as their catalog is here. Every stream of theirs counts as 1.05 when a listener’s fee gets divided up. They’re betting on something unproven. That ought to be worth real money, permanently.
At launch, with a small subscriber base, the per-stream rate will be low. The number will be real and it will be public. Nothing comes out for a manager or a label before your share is calculated. Every subscriber we add puts more money in the pool.
The people who work here will make enough to live on. At least 150% of a credible living-wage benchmark: in the U.S., a population-weighted national average built from the MIT Living Wage Calculator’s state figures (MIT publishes no national rate), which rises with the person’s place of residence when the local MIT figure is higher; something comparable and independent everywhere else, reviewed every January. We’ll publish that number too. Nobody here should need a second job. They’ll get full health coverage, disability, a retirement plan with a match, and if somebody gets sick, we’ll carry them. That’s what the insurance is for.
Everybody works 32 hours a week. Not a perk. A policy. The expectations aren’t lower. Deadlines are real. The platform doesn’t go down. There are no acceptable breaches, not one, ever. The work gets done and it gets done right. It just gets done in 32 hours, by people who’ve slept. For the jobs that need somebody awake at 3 a.m. (operations, security, infrastructure) we staff shifts instead of asking one person to never put the phone down. We’ll hire whoever it takes to keep the thing running the way it should. Overwork isn’t a value here. Rest isn’t a prize for finishing. It’s 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 get artists the most money is to quit skimming it on the way, so I don’t. I’m not asking you to admire that. It’s the mechanism. It’s how the math works.
WHAT WE WILL NEVER DO
We will never run an ad.
Not one. 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’s the only mechanism.
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.
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.
No CEO, board or investor can ever sell SOUND.
The only path to a sale runs through the artists and the subscribers: a two-thirds vote of the Artist Advisory Board and a two-thirds vote of subscribers of at least six months, and only to a buyer who agrees in writing, before any vote is held, to keep every Article in force. A deal that would strip an Article is rejected automatically and never reaches a vote. 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 put this in writing.
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 person made, or one our algorithm put together to help you discover something new, never one tuned to 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. $11.99 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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