How fan-powered royalties work

1. A listener subscribes to Premium. $14.99 a month or $175.99 a year. Plans and FAQ.
2. Each day the subscriber contributes a flat $0.25 to creators. It is the same amount every day of every month, so an artist can count on it. The month-length rounding lands on the platform's side, not the artist's.
3. That $0.25 is divided across the creators the subscriber actually played that day, in proportion to listening time. A listener who played two artists equally sends each of them half. A listener who played nobody contributes nothing that day; the slice is not handed to someone else.
4. Earnings are calculated and settled every night. Artists see a live figure during the day and a finalized figure after settlement. Finalized days do not change.
5. Splits are applied per track. If a track declares that other people share the recording, each night's earnings for that track divide three ways: paid to collaborators who have accepted their share, held in escrow for collaborators who were invited but have not yet accepted, and the remainder to the uploader. Escrow runs 90 days from the invite; accepting inside that window releases the whole accrued amount retroactively. More on splits.
6. Verified creators withdraw their balance to a bank account. Earnings accrue from day one; verification controls withdrawal, not whether money is earned.

Family plans

A family plan shares one subscription across several people. Its daily contribution is one pool for the whole family, divided equally across the seats enrolled that day, and each seat's slice then follows that person's own listening. A seat that did not listen contributes nothing, and its slice is not redistributed to the other seats' artists: one creator's pay should never depend on whether an unrelated family member opened the app.

What this is not

• There is no play-count pool shared across the whole platform.
• There is no minimum stream threshold a track has to clear before it earns.
• There is no per-stream rate set by the platform. The amount an artist earns per listen depends on how much of a listener's day that artist was.

Before a track can earn

Every upload is fingerprinted against known recordings. At publish time the uploader answers five questions on the record: whether they control the master, whether the track is a cover, whether it contains samples and whether they are cleared, whether to enrol it in YouTube Content ID, and whether it was released before. Those answers are stored with a timestamp and are what a human reviewer reads if anyone later disputes the track.