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 $11.99 a month, or $143.88 for a year, the same twelve months. Every month’s subscription money goes into one pot, with a yearly plan counted a month at a time. That is the starting number, published in full. A refund, or a payment a bank takes back, comes off that pot before anything is shared, and the report says how many there were.

Paying for the year costs the same, but it costs us less to process, because card processing charges a percentage plus a flat fee on every single charge. The flat fee is $0.30, which on a $11.99 payment is 2.5% by itself, nearly as much as the percentage rate. Billed monthly, processing your subscription costs about $7.77 a year. Billed once, about $4.47. The $3.30 difference goes into the Artist Pool with everything else. Paying by bank debit instead of a card does the same every month: about $0.55 more into the Artist Pool, after a one-time $1.50 verification. Cards are the default; bank debit is there if you want it. 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 15.35%, the statutory rate for 2027) 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.

For the launch period, subscribers are charged those bills only up to 20 percent of revenue. Card processing, subscription billing, audio delivery and artist payout fees are charged through in full, because they are third-party tolls that scale with every payment and every play; every other cost above the 20 percent line is paid by the launch fund, never by the Artist Pool, until the bills fall under the line on their own, which the lean plan puts at about 50,750 subscribers. The monthly report prints three lines: operating costs this month, paid by the launch fund, charged to subscribers.

4. A one-month safety buffer.

SOUND holds back enough to cover one month of operating costs, as a cushion so the platform cannot be knocked over by a bad month. The launch fund builds it during the launch period. After the launch cap lapses, the Artist Pool tops it up to one month of costs: normally just that month’s growth in costs, and if the cushion is ever spent, the refill, shown in that month’s report.

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. The fees of subscribers who stream nothing in a month are not kept by SOUND; they are shared in equal amounts among every artist that paying listeners played over a trailing twelve months, so one quiet month never drops an artist. Each artist's share is capped at no more than half the songwriter royalties, operating costs and reserve taken off its own listeners' fees, and never enough to lift its total above what those listeners paid, so a would-be fraudster can't come out ahead. Anything the caps can't place carries to the next month, and the whole sum is published as its own line in the monthly accounting.

Founding artists will get a small, permanent edge. Artists whose music is first listed on SOUND in its first six months will carry a 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 goes up slightly and the newer artist’s goes down by the same amount. It never reaches an artist you didn’t play, and it never draws on the pool beyond your fee. It 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 about authenticity: a play counts once it reaches the standard 30-second mark, and plays our fraud rules exclude never count at all. Those rules are part of the payment engine we’ll publish at launch. And under the Mission Articles, plays during a free trial are paid only if the trial becomes a paid subscription.

The “per-stream rate” you will see published is an average. It is not the payout mechanism. No one is paid a flat global rate; the real math is the user-centric split above.

The difference, in one fan.

Take the illustrative month, where the average subscription leaves $6.99 for the Artist Pool after the songwriter share and the bills. A listener who plays you 20 times in a 200-play month sends you a tenth of that, $0.70. A listener who plays you 20 times in a 2,000-play month sends you $0.07. A pooled split at the same assumed average rate pays you $0.20 for either.

You are paid from your first play. SOUND pays the cost of sending your money; nothing is ever taken from your balance for it, and a balance never expires.

If you make music, type the streams and listeners your dashboard shows for a month and watch the same plays computed at the published rate, with the arithmetic printed underneath so you can check it. What your plays would have paid →

It always adds up. Every artist’s payment is rounded to whole cents, and the Artist Pool plus anything carried in from last month is fully accounted for: paid out, carried forward, or held undistributed. The software refuses to produce a result if it does not close 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 the national living wage for a single adult, the population-weighted average of the MIT Living Wage Calculator’s state figures, and never below 150% of the MIT figure for the county where the employee lives when that is higher. On MIT’s February 2026 data the national floor is $76,824 a year, and in Montgomery County, Maryland, where SOUND is based, the local floor is $91,354. 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 no CEO, board or investor can sell SOUND and there is no exit windfall to dangle. The team is fully remote.

Bonuses.

There is one bonus at SOUND, and it is not paid from subscriptions. Salaries sit in published ranges that rise with the cost of living every January, and with the standard benefits, that is the pay package. The one bonus is the Employee Community Bonus Pool, and not a cent of it comes from subscriptions or the Artist Pool: it is funded only by people who choose to tip SOUND itself, less the card fee; it is split among employees by the artists’ board and the company’s board together; it is reported in full every month; and the founder can never receive any of it.

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; against the national floor that is 2.6 times. 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 CEO, ever.

Why you can trust this

The code that calculates every artist’s pay is open source, public on GitHub from launch. The monthly report will say “trust us.” The open-source engine will say “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.