About Rivet

Why it exists

Streaming pays almost nothing to almost everyone, and the reason is structural rather than mean-spirited. On the big platforms every subscription goes into one pot, and artists are paid their share of all streams on the service. If you subscribe and listen to nothing but one local band for a month, virtually none of your money reaches them. It goes to whoever charted globally.

Rivet divides each subscriber's fee only between the artists that subscriber actually played. It is a different formula, not a different adjective — and it is the only thing here a competitor could not copy by writing better marketing.

But streaming is not the point

Even a fair streaming model turns fractions of a cent into fractions of a cent. The money is in people buying music. A $3.00 purchase here pays an artist $2.35 — about what five hundred streams pay on a pooled platform.

So Rivet is a storefront with a player attached, rather than a streaming service with a shop bolted on. Streaming is how somebody finds the music. The sale is how the artist eats.

How the money works

• Artists keep 90% of a sale, after the card network takes its fee.
• Artists keep 75% of streaming. We keep more of streaming than of sales because every play costs us bandwidth and a sale costs us almost nothing — we take more where we spend more.
• Sale money goes into the artist's own Stripe account at the moment of purchase. We never hold it.
• Nothing is exclusive. No distribution fee, no yearly charge, no lock-in.

We are opening country by country

Anyone anywhere can listen, buy music and follow artists today. Releasing music is open in United States and Canada for now — phase one — and the reason is money rather than principle: those are the countries we can reliably pay artists in. Taking someone's music and then not being able to pay them is the one thing we will not do.

Phase two widens it, and we are working towards artists anywhere in the world. If you make music somewhere we have not reached, sign up anyway — you get a full listener account, and we will write to you the day your country opens. The waiting list is how we decide which one is next.

What Rivet is not

The catalogue is small. There is no recommendation engine — that needs millions of listeners before it produces anything but noise, and a weak one is worse than none. There are no native apps yet. If you are choosing a service by library size, this is not the one.

What is here instead: the people who already love your music can pay you properly, and you keep selling everywhere else.

Who builds it

Rivet Music is built and run by Ice House Tech. It is small and independent, which is why the terms are what they are.