Our beta apps are to be used on the basis that we are a volunteer collective, working towards incorporating a co-operative regulated by the relevant UK authorities, and a key part of that process will be formalising full and legally binding terms & conditions which outline the obligations of the different parties on the platform.
That said, in the mean time we have laid out some plain and simple explanations of how our platform-in-progress works for uploaders here:
Any account on patrontape can onboard and 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 streaming. We are tracking all listens but only those listens from paid subscribers 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.
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 endeavour to track listening activity to the second. There are some rare technical limitations that complicate that (eg listeners losing connection and closing their browser page before coming back online) but even these are mitigated in our upcoming moblie app through offline-first synced data storage. Tracking seconds over a count of streams means the system can’t be gamed with short songs and doesn’t penaliase longer compositions.
As things stand, the only method of revenue sharing on our platform is our internal tracking of individual subscriptions. This means we aren’t currently reporting streams to PROs / Collecting Societies across any territories, although it is okay to upload material registered with those societies, subject to the below caveat.
We are requiring all uploaders to ensure anything they distribute on Patrontape is work for which they are the sole beneficiary of streaming revenue and have the authority to make an exemption, in respect of any works already registered with societies or other rightsholding third parties, to allow Patrontape to provide on demand streaming of the works. Or alternatively, you have been given permission to do so by the rightsholders.
Basically, nothing which contains contributions or samples incurring performance or mechanical royalties owed to parties who you’ve not made a prior agreement with to enable the upload. So, cover versions, samples, featured artists etc - just be sure every contributor is okay with the upload, the exemption and most importantly everyone is receiving their share!
This is subject to ongoing discussion and there’s some information behind our rationale here.
We are currently implementing a manual verification process for uploads. This means before a release can go live, one of our team will give it a check to see if they notice anything suspicious. We will reach out to artists if we’re not convinced an upload is genuine based on the information we have, most notably checking the verified email address of the user account and release information provided.
In the future, this might swap out to an automated process, or a community verification network for uploaders. On that note, please do shoot us an email if you think you see anything on the site that doesn’t look right - streaming fraud is a very real and pressing problem which causes a major headache for artists and the industry is exceptionally slow to respond to, so we don’t want to continue that trend. 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.