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Fair Music Platforms

Fair Music platforms can be defined by those which directly support musicians in a transparent manner. Ideally they are open-source collectives.

The Good

These plus Radio Free Fedi are where I search for the talent featured on NHAM.

I am sure there are some I’ve not yet discovered. If you know of any please do send me (Sam) a message on Mastodon.

The Bad

The following platforms, within the part of the music industry does not work on behalf of musicians, won’t be linked from this website if I can help it. Those which serve ads and trackers. No, thank you.

  • Amazon Music
  • Apple Music
  • Deezer
  • Soundcloud
  • Spotify (read more below)
  • Tidal
  • Youtube Music

The Ugly

Once renowned for supporting underground music, allowing fans to buy downloads and physical media direct from artists and labels, and only taking a small fee themselves, Bandcamp has recently been through two large buyouts, with staff lay offs ensuing. It is neither open-source nor a collective. For these reasons I’d ideally like not to include it. However, I do understand that a lot of small and indie artists still rely on the platform and at present they do still get to take home a decent 80-odd percent of the sales fees, which is still a pretty decent return.

Hopefully in time more artists will be able to direct people to their profiles on the platforms listed at the top of this page.

What’s so bad about Spotify?

  1. None of the mainstream streaming services pay artists more than US $0.01 per stream. And that’s at the very top end, with a premium paying customer in a premium market. Spotify pay the lowest.
  2. Spotify changed their payout system in April 2024 to only pay artists for their streams once that track is streamed at least 1,000 times in a calendar year.
  3. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek invests in AI technology for the military industrial complex and Spotify hosts several podcasts that support it.

The info above is from a thread by Kydia which goes in to more detail.

Revenue Share

While Spotify pay from nothing to peanuts to indy artists, here’s how the recommended platforms compare:

PlatformArtist Share (exc. payment processing fee)
FaircampEssentially 100% as it’s self-hosted
Mirlo93%
Wavlake90%
Jam.Coop85%
Bandcamp85%
Resonate70% + share of any profits from remaining 30%