transparency.
i’ve been part of the music community for years and i wanted to start the app that didn’t exist for me: ethical, curated, and artist-first. i’m starting second press from the ground up. no big company behind it, no advertisers, no investors. it runs entirely on the artists who’ve trusted it with their music and the listeners who choose to subscribe, so it’s only fair you can see exactly where every dollar of that goes.
where each $12 goes.
70% of every subscription, after stripe’s payment processing fee, goes straight to the artists*you played that month — their master royalty. second press pays APRA AMCOS directly for the communication of musical works on top of that — a further 15% of net revenue covering songwriter royalties. the remaining 15% keeps second press running.
where it goes as we grow.
second press’s 15% gets used roughly like this:
- keep the lights on. data transfer, storage, hosting, the web app, accounting.
- grow the platform. better infrastructure, an android app, more editorial content, a small marketing budget.
- eventually, pay me - and maybe a small team. like my musician friends, i too need to pay rent and eat on occasion. if the platform ever sustains more than that, getting some help (community, editorial, engineering) would be wonderful.
what we won’t do.
- no ad-supported free tier. every stream comes from a paying subscriber.
- no AI-generated music on the platform. ever.
- no selling or sharing listener data with third parties.
- no funding unethical ventures - no military tech, no taking money from anyone whose values don’t line up with the platform’s.
