Compare
Fan-powered vs pro-rata streaming royalties
Most streaming services pool every subscriber's money and divide it by total plays. Creator Connect divides each subscriber's money among the artists that subscriber played. The difference, with a worked example.
Pro-rata: how most streaming pays
Every subscriber's payment goes into one pool for the month. The pool is divided by every stream on the platform. Your money does not go to the artists you played; it goes to the pool, and the pool goes mostly to whoever had the most streams. Since 2024, Spotify also pays nothing on tracks under 1,000 streams in a year.
Fan-powered: how Creator Connect pays
Your payment is divided among the artists you played, weighted by how long you listened. Nobody else's listening touches your money. Each Premium subscriber contributes a flat $0.25 per day to the creators they played that day, and the platform settles it nightly. Step by step.
Side by side
| Pro-rata | Fan-powered (Creator Connect) | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your money goes | One platform-wide pool | The artists you played |
| Who decides the split | Everyone's listening combined | Your own listening |
| Minimum before a track earns | Often a stream threshold (Spotify: 1,000 / year) | None |
| Rate | Fractions of a cent per stream, set by the pool | $0.25 per subscriber per day, divided by listening time |
| Settlement | Monthly or later, through a distributor | Nightly, to the artist's balance |
| Collaborators | Paid by whoever receives the statement | Paid automatically by declared splits, with escrow for late acceptances |
A worked example
A Premium subscriber pays $14.99 a month and listens only to one independent artist.
- Fan-powered: that artist receives $0.25 for each day the subscriber listened, about $7.50 for a full month, from that one fan.
- Pro-rata: the same $14.99 enters a pool where that artist's share is their fraction of all streams on the service. For most independent artists that rounds to a few cents, and under a 1,000-stream threshold it is zero.
Where fan-powered is honest about its limits
An artist earns here from the listeners they have here. Fan-powered payouts do not change what other platforms pay. The model rewards a real audience, not viral volume: a hundred devoted listeners pay an artist directly, and a million passive plays from people who never chose that artist do not exist to be paid for.
The founder's longer argument: Music streaming's broken promise.