In the last year, artists have started publishing their music to bitcoin enabled RSS feeds so that fans can support them directly as they listen on apps like Fountain.
Under the value for value system, music is made freely available everywhere and fans can pay as much or as little as they want. This gives independent artists the opportunity to earn much more than the $0.003 they get for every stream on Spotify.
This model may well be the answer to the problematic streaming royalties system used today in the music industry. However, the music still needs to be discovered by listeners before they begin to see payments come through.
Many of these artists are getting exposure when their tracks are featured in music podcasts, or make their way into the music charts. However we still need more discovery tools to help new releases reach a large audience and showcase the diverse catalogue of music out there waiting to be found.
So we had an idea.
Introducing Fountain Radio
We built Fountain Radio to help great music get discovered and give the community a place to enjoy it together.
For artists, Fountain Radio is the ideal launchpad for your music. Add your tracks to the queue, find supporters and build deeper connections with fans.
For listeners, Fountain Radio is the perfect companion for a day at the office. Discover new music, support the artists directly, queue your favorite tracks and chat to other listeners.
How it Works
- Log in with your Fountain account on desktop or mobile: You can also log in with Nostr using the Alby browser extension.
- Listen to the track currently playing and boost to support: Fountain takes a 1% split and the rest goes to the artist.
- Add a track to the queue for 100 sats (which is around five cents): You can search for any track in Podcast Index.
- Upvote tracks to move them to the front of the queue: The track with the most sats will play next.
- Save your favourite tracks to your library: Listen to your latest discoveries again in the Fountain app.
- Join the live chat and hang out with other listeners and artists: You can post in the chat for free and see all recent activity.
How to post your music on Fountain
There are a couple of different services that you can use to publish your music to an RSS feed and make it available in apps like Fountain.
Wavlake: Upload as many tracks as you like for free. They create a bitcoin wallet for you and charge a 10% fee on each payment you receive from listeners. To share your earnings with your music collaborators, you can ask them to create a Wavlake account so you can add them to the splits. To learn more, read their guide.
RSS Blue: Upload up to nine tracks each month for a monthly fee of $6 (as long as they’re under 5 minutes or 5MB) with no fees on payments. After uploading, you and your collaborators can create an account on Fountain then add your Fountain Lightning Addresses to the splits. To learn more, read their guide.
