Patrontape is a community project built and maintained by a team of volunteers.
Any account on patrontape can upload music for free. Music distributed on the platform will be made available to all listeners with a paid subscription to stream, with the flexibility to enable preview streaming on a per-song basis and allow public store-front streaming to encourage subscribers to adopt the platform. Note that for these tracks, it’s only listens from paid subscribers which will result in revenue share payouts.
Your share of revenue is calcualted on a per-subscription basis. Meaning, if a listener pays £10 per month for their subscription and streams your music for 100% of that month, you will recieve 100% of that subscription after Patrontape’s administrative cut has been taken, which is currently pinned at 20%, so your final payout would be £8 - with the small caveat that tracks which are registered works with a PRO / Collection Society will have a small additional deduction (see below).
Tracks can be shared between multiple user accounts, meaning listening time on those particular tracks would be further split between percentage splits of collaborating artists.
We base shares of subscription based on total number of seconds listened, not number of total streams.
We have built our platform on the basis that our platform revenue sharing model presents the fairest system for independent musicians and listeners, and this represents the primary means of renumeration for artists on the platform.
That said, when uploading tracks with artists (or other interested parties) registered here in the UK by PRS/MCPS members, we need to incorporate this as a separate royalty stream. This will also apply to international equivalents if and when we expand into other territories.
This is because writers, performers and interested parties represented by these organisations have undergone a transfer of rights for works they produce. When we offer these works for on demand streaming, the societies are obliged to collect their royalties on these works through a licence that Patrontape must pre pay using yearly estimates.
Because the royalties are paid on a different basis (based on number of streams, and not as a proportion of an individual user’s subscription contribution), and out of fairness to those who are not represented by these societies, we perform a calculation and adjust payouts for represented artists to account for the cost of the licence incurred by the number of streams of represented works in the payout.
This adjustment should, by our estimation, be a very small proportion of each payout.
This complexity is subject to ongoing discussion and may be adjusted in future.
Uploads on Patrontape are verified via a community verification network. This means before a release can go live, one of our trusted verifiers will check the details and use factors such as verified email, social accounts, ongoing account activity and evidence of uploads on other platforms. We will reach out to artists if we’re not convinced an upload is genuine based on the information we have.
We will gradually roll out auto verification on trusted accounts, but preventing streaming fraud is a key factor in building our network. We acknowledge it is demoralising for independents to be in competition with bad actors for their revenue shares (another good reason for per-subscription shares!) and we want to keep Patrontape a positive and fraud-free space.