Your music isworth more
Our app guarantees a minimum of $0.01 per play, lets you sell digital music directly to fans, and gives you an 80% revenue share.
No annual fees · No subscriptions · Keep your masters
A better deal for musicians
Tapedeck started with a pretty simple frustration: streaming pays artists too little. For years, the biggest platforms have made enormous businesses out of music while the people making it are left fighting over fractions of a cent.
We took the artist-first parts we liked from streaming services, record stores, and direct-to-fan platforms, put them together, and built Tapedeck around the idea that more of the money should end up with the artist.
- $0.01per track stream
- No pro-rata sharing, a person streams your song, you get paid.
- $1per track purchase
- Set your own track prices in USD, people can pay more than what you ask.
- $10per album purchase
- Set your own album prices in USD, people can pay more than what you ask.
These are our default prices on the app, you are free to adjust and experiment with pricing in our Content Management System (CMS)
Your superfans can choose to pay more
When you sell tracks or albums on Tapedeck, your asking price doesn’t have to be the limit.
Fans can choose to pay 2x, 3x, or 5x more, giving the people who care most about your music a direct way to support you.
More ways to get discovered
Music discovery on Tapedeck is designed to give emerging artists a real shot. We recommend similar artists alongside bigger names, help fans explore by mood, genre, tempo, and more.
In addition to curated content in Listen Now, selected artists are featured in Spotlight where people can preview their music before committing to a full listen.
Grow your audience,
get paid for it
Earn $1 for every new Tapedeck app install you drive. We pay this on top of all the royalties from every track those fans play or buy.
How we compare
This is how our music streaming services compares to others. We offer flexibility and transparent pricing with no limits.
| Feature | Tapedeck | Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum per-stream rate | $0.01 | Not published1 | Not published | Not monetised | Not published1 |
| Artist revenue share | 80% | Approx. 66.6%2 | Not published | Avg. 82%3 | Approx. 66.6%2 |
| Record store | Yes | No | No4 | Yes | No |
| Set your own prices | Yes | No | No | Yes | No |
| Fans can pay more | Yes | -- | -- | Yes | -- |
| Schedule release date | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Sell digital music | Yes | No | No | No | No |
Get your music on Tapedeck and everywhere else in one go. Distribute the same release to Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, and 25+ other platforms without starting over.
Learn more about our distribution services- 1 In Spotify, tracks must have reached a threshold of at least 1,000 streams in the previous 12 months to be included in the recorded music royalty pool calculation · https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/track-monetization-eligibility/
- 2 Figure published in Spotify’s “Loud & Clear FAQ” · https://loudandclear.byspotify.com/faq/#spotifys-share
- 3 Figure published in “Bandcamp for Artists” · https://bandcamp.com/artists
- 4 Apple still operates the separate iTunes Store, but purchasing isn’t part of the Apple Music streaming product
Built by a real musician
I’m Tim Quirk, the mind behind Tapedeck.
I’ve spent decades making music with Too Much Joy and Wonderlick, while also helping build digital music services like Rhapsody and Google Play Music. I’ve seen streaming from both sides: building the platforms, and getting paid by them as an artist.
Everything we do at Tapedeck comes from that experience. I wanted to build a better deal for artists like myself, and prove that it can work.
Our stance on AI generated music
We are an artist-first platform through and through, and we believe art is made by people, for people.
We are not interested in policing the tools musicians use. People have always made music with whatever was available to them, from drum machines and samplers to Auto-Tune and software instruments. AI is going to be part of that toolbox too.
What we do not want is a catalog full of music nobody really made.
It is now possible to generate thousands of tracks, upload them at scale, and hope a few of them catch streams. That may be good for someone trying to game a platform, but it is bad for musicians and bad for listeners.
Artists already have to fight hard enough to get heard. They should not have to compete with an endless supply of automatically generated tracks made to fill search results, playlists, and royalty pools.
We review every release by ourselves. We look for spam, fraudulent uploads, and mass-produced AI music, and we do our best to keep it off Tapedeck and out of the music we distribute.
That does not mean a song stops being real because AI was used somewhere in the process. If a musician uses AI as a tool to make something that is genuinely theirs, that is very different from pressing a button 5,000 times and calling the output a catalog.
We care about the person behind the music. Someone wrote it, played it, produced it, obsessed over it, changed it, hated it, fixed it, and eventually decided it was ready for somebody else to hear.
That is the music we want Tapedeck to be built around. There will always be easier ways to manufacture more content, we would rather make more room for artists.
Backed by Zedge
Tapedeck is backed by Zedge, a public company that has spent years helping independent creators earn from their work. Since 2017, we have paid artists millions of dollars in royalties.
We aren’t starting from zero. We already know how to build products that pay creators at scale and you know you’re working with a reliable partner.
FAQ
Tapedeck guarantees a minimum of $0.01 per play. Artists can also set higher prices, so one cent is the floor, not the ceiling.
Yes. You can sell digital music directly in the app, with default pricing like $1 per track and $10 per album, and you can adjust those prices in the CMS.
Yes. Fans can choose to pay 2x, 3x, or 5x more, which gives superfans a simple way to support you beyond the base price.
Discovery is built to give emerging artists a real chance. Tapedeck recommends similar artists, supports browsing by mood and genre, and features selected artists in places like Spotlight and curated listening surfaces.
Yes. If you bring in new listeners through your affiliate link, you can earn $1 per new install on top of any streaming or purchase revenue those fans generate afterward.
No. Tapedeck is built around direct fan spending rather than a pooled subscription system, so the money is more closely tied to what listeners actually choose to play and buy.