SOUND Illustrative and pre-launch

The artist calculator

What your plays would have paid

Pull up your dashboard. Spotify for Artists, Apple Music for Artists, Bandcamp, whichever one you check. It shows you two numbers for the month: how many times your songs were played and how many people played them. Put them here and see what the same plays would have paid on SOUND, with the arithmetic printed underneath so you can check it.

SOUND does the arithmetic the way you'd assume it already worked. A subscription is $11.99. The first 15.35 percent comes off the top and goes to songwriters and their publishing organizations, a legally set pass-through we keep none of. Out of what's left we pay the bills, every one of them itemized in public. Whatever remains is the artist pool, and nobody takes a margin out of it. Divide that pool by all the plays that earned it and what falls out is the per-play rate. It is not a number anyone chooses. It is arithmetic: pool on top, plays on the bottom.

The play count your dashboard shows for the window. A Spotify stream counts at 30 seconds, and so does a play on SOUND, so the two are the same kind of thing. Numbers only; commas are fine.

How many people those plays came from, for the same window. Leave it blank and the page still shows the figure; fill it in and it shows what each listener would have sent you.

The window those numbers cover

The figures appear here as you type.

Show the math

This is the light bill. Every line is from SOUND's published illustrative month, the same one the demo's transparency page prints, and it is the part of this page that makes the rest believable.

The illustrative month, on assumed plays per subscriber and the lean cost plan, a lean team; a bigger team would cost more and pay less a play (model run September 15, 2026)
74,409 subscribers, $11.1051 each on average, founding members at the founding rate and accessible regional prices by country included$826,317.73
less the refunds and lost disputes returned to subscribers that month, 372 refunds and 149 disputes on assumed rates, which come off before anything is shared−$5,784.22
Revenue after reversals$820,533.51
Songwriters and publishers, 15.35 percent of revenue after reversals. The 2027 figure, the latest year Table 1 of 37 CFR 385.21 sets, the all-in royalty for musical works, which steps up every year (2023 15.1, 2024 15.2, 2025 15.25, 2026 15.3, 2027 15.35 percent).−$125,951.89
Operating costs this month on the lean plan, itemized$174,792.83
Paid by the launch fund, a memo line that never touches the pool$0.00
Charged to subscribers, 21.3 percent of revenue after reversals; the launch cap is 20 percent on costs other than card processing, subscription billing, audio delivery and artist payout fees, and it did not bind this month−$174,792.83
founder salary: founder / CEO salary ($200k/yr, charter-capped)$16,666.67
salaries: team salaries ($705k/yr — eng, product, artist/community, ops)$58,750.00
payroll taxes: employer FICA + FUTA/SUTA$6,133.33
health insurance: team health benefits$4,900.00
retirement match: retirement match, 4% of wages, immediately vested$3,016.67
payment processing: Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 a card charge (monthly billing), 0.8% for the bank-debit opt-ins, the international-card and currency tolls, the same rate on the tax inside stickers abroad, and $15 a dispute$54,973.88
infrastructure: cloud compute — API, database, workers$5,500.00
cdn bandwidth: audio storage + delivery — Cloudflare R2 (free egress)$1,500.00
audit accounting: bookkeeping + the monthly CPA review$3,800.00
legal: outside counsel (amortized)$3,500.00
customer support: listener + artist support$2,500.00
marketing: minimal — organic / word-of-mouth by design$1,500.00
misc: software/SaaS + insurance (D&O / E&O / cyber)$4,500.00
stripe billing: Stripe Billing, 0.7% of the volume billed, the tax inside stickers abroad included$6,103.29
artist payout fees: the payout rails' fees, ACH and PayPal, paid by SOUND$1,448.99
Set aside for the operating reserve this month; while the launch fund pays, it tops up the reserve, and after its part ends the pool tops the reserve up to one month of costs as costs grow−$0.00
Artist pool$519,788.79
Qualifying plays by the 74,409 subscribers that month51,639,846
plus the trial-week plays of the 7,605 subscribers whose free trials converted that month, paid as part of their first paid month at the same rate, out of their own fee (Mission Articles, Article V)1,213,812
Qualifying plays paid from the pool that month52,853,658
Per play, pool divided by plays$0.009834
the same pool at the ends of the estimate, 623 and 761 plays a person$0.010955 · $0.008969
Pool per subscriber that month, which does not move with listening$6.9856
Plays per subscriber that month, on average694
Plays per listener that month, on average: the subscribers' qualifying plays over the 70,534 subscribers who played something732.127
Plays per subscriber in the listening model, the mean, 623 to 761 across the estimate's interval. Estimated from public figures: Luminate's 2025 Year-End Music Report (1.4 trillion United States on-demand audio streams, about 92 percent of them from paid accounts by the report's own figures) over RIAA's 2025 Year-End Revenue Report (106.5 million full-tier paid accounts, the annual average), adjusted for what the two reports count differently, gives about 922 qualifying plays per paid account a month; other services sell shared accounts, an assumed 1.33 people each, and a seeded simulation over all of these inputs puts the per-person figure at 694 (the rounded figures divide to 693; the simulation's median is what the model carries), assumed until SOUND's first real month.694
the typical listener (the median), the heavy listener (the 75th percentile) and the light listener (the 25th), plays a month421 · 826 · 214
Pool per subscriber for a year of months like this one, twelve times the month's unrounded figure$83.83
At 1,000,000 subscribers, lean scenario: pool per subscriber per year $94.35, over 694-play months plus the converted trials' plays, 0.92 percent more at that scale, on the assumed regional mix$0.011226
the same at the ends of the regional-mix estimate, the share paying the full price at a million between 65 and 95 percent (assumed 80)$0.010061 · $0.012391
The pooled model, for comparison: Spotify, 2024, per stream to an independent artist$0.0030

The launch cap did not bind this month: costs other than card processing, subscription billing, audio delivery and artist payout fees were 13.5 percent of revenue after reversals, under the 20 percent line.

Streams and listeners are what your dashboard shows; a Spotify stream is counted when a listener plays a song for at least 30 seconds (Spotify for Artists, "How your streams are counted"), and a qualifying play on SOUND is the same 30 seconds. The whole accounting, with the engine that computes it, is on the demo's transparency page.

Before you send this to anyone, the caveats

Launch is smaller than the illustrative month. At launch the launch fund pays the bills above the 20 percent line, so on the lean plan the assumed rate runs from about 0.6 cents a play at the start to about 0.9 cents by 50,750 subscribers, about 37 months after launch on the model's assumed growth, where the fund's part ends. Those are modeled on an assumed listening average until the first real month. It will be real and it will be published every month. Nothing comes out for a manager or a label before it exists.

SOUND does not pay a flat rate per play. There is no global number every stream is worth. What is left of a listener's fee after songwriters, costs, refunds, lost disputes and the operating reserve goes only to the artists they played, split by how much they played each of them, so the figure above assumes your listeners listen an average amount overall. If your fans play you and not much else, each fan is worth more than this implies; if you're one song in an assumed 732-play month, less. That assumed 0.98 cents is the thermometer. The user-centric split is the body.

Every yearly figure here is twelve times the monthly figure shown, rounded to the cent, the way twelve monthly statements add up; enter a year and the year is what you entered, with the monthly figures a twelfth of it.

SOUND has no free tier: every play here comes from a paying subscriber, and a free trial's plays are paid only if the trial converts (Mission Articles, Article V). And all of it is illustrative and pre-launch: the artist agreement is not a signed document, the company is being formed and SOUND has not paid a cent to anyone. This is what the rate does to your plays, not a check anyone is writing.

Want the first real month when it lands?

Every figure above is illustrative. SOUND has not opened, so no month has been published and no rate has been measured. When the first one is, it goes up in full, with the costs itemized and the arithmetic you just watched. Leave an address and I will send it.

One email, when there is something real to show. No list, no drip, no sharing it with anyone. Nothing else on this page is sent anywhere.

Where to go from here