Campfire's model

How the money will move.

When Campfire opens, your subscription will be divided only among the artists you actually played. No pooled catalogue, no per-stream rate.

There has been no public first use of the app; Campfire's nonprofit services (research, education, events, advocacy) are already public. The app remains in closed noncommercial testing; no subscription is being charged. Everything below describes how the model is designed to work at launch.

The two models

Pooled royalties versus your own listening

Most streaming platforms pay artists out of one enormous pool. Every subscriber's payment lands in the same regional bucket, then gets divided by total stream share across the whole platform. If you spend a month replaying one independent artist, most of your subscription still flows toward whichever artists have the largest total audience platform-wide, because the pool has no way to know who you personally listened to.

Pro-rata: the industry standard

Your subscription enters a shared pool with every other subscriber's payment. Artists are paid based on their share of total platform streams, not your streams specifically.

User-centric: Campfire's model

Your subscription will be divided only among the artists you played that period, in proportion to how much you played each one. No one else's listening will touch your money, and yours will not touch anyone else's.

The 80/20 split

Eighty percent goes to rights holders

Campfire will keep the split simple and fixed. Eighty percent of your subscription goes to the rights holders of the music you actually streamed, divided in proportion to your own listening. Out of that eighty percent Campfire funds the licenses that pay songwriters and publishers, and the remainder goes to whoever owns the recording. The other twenty percent covers hosting, development, and the cost of running Campfire as a nonprofit. There will be no advance pool, no negotiated minimum that favors one artist over another, and no major-label catalogue in the mix.

80% to rights holders

Allocated per listener, per period, from your own play counts rather than a platform-wide average. Songwriter and publisher licensing is funded out of this share, and the remainder goes to the owner of the recording.

20% to run Campfire

Hosting, app development, and the operating costs of a nonprofit team building this in the open. No shareholders take a cut.

Where the Money GoesRoyalty Calculator

The legal mechanics

Three rights, licensed the way the law requires

Every on-demand stream involves three separate rights: the master recording, the public performance of the composition, and the mechanical reproduction of the composition. Campfire will secure all three before launch. Two of them come through industry-standard licenses that cover an entire catalogue at once. The third, the master recording, has no such license in the United States, so Campfire will license every recording directly from the person or label that owns it.

Master rights

No industry-wide or statutory license exists for streaming a recording on demand, so Campfire will license every master directly and non-exclusively from its owner. Campfire will only work with artists who own both their masters and their publishing, or with independent catalogues case by case. Artists keep ownership and stay free to release anywhere else.

Performance rights

Licenses with the performing rights organizations: ASCAP, BMI and SESAC, with others such as GMR added only if the catalogue ever requires them. These cover the composition being publicly performed, and nothing else.

Mechanical rights

A separate license administered by The MLC, the Mechanical Licensing Collective created by the Music Modernization Act of 2018, which pays statutory mechanical royalties to songwriters and publishers. This is a different license from the performance one, not the same one.

Cover songs will not be accepted at launch. The statutory mechanical license would permit them, but Campfire is starting with original recordings while the catalogue and reporting are established. Fully AI-generated recordings will not be accepted either, and neither will AI-generated artist personas: an artist account has to represent a real person, not a synthetic or fictional one. Artists remain free to use AI tools while making a record. Campfire will not pay advances, and no label will be offered a preferential rate.

Get Registered with a PRO and the MLC

Further reading

The research behind user-centric royalties

We did not invent the idea that pooled royalties leave most artists behind. Independent research, a major platform's own published data, and the federal government's own explanation of mechanical licensing all back different pieces of this page.

MIDiA Research: Fan Powered Royalties data

An analysis of SoundCloud's user-centric payouts found that for artists who earned more under the model, superfans made up only about 2 percent of their audience but contributed about 42 percent of their income.

SoundCloud: Fan Powered Royalties

SoundCloud's own description of the model it launched, with real artist case studies showing income moving with a fan's actual listening rather than platform-wide totals.

Music Business Worldwide: the Pro Musik study

A 2022 study of 50,000 independent SoundCloud artists found roughly 4 in 10 would earn more under a user-centric model and a similar share would earn less, with gains concentrated among artists who reach a broad, dedicated audience rather than the highest-volume outliers.

U.S. Copyright Office: the Music Modernization Act

The federal government's own summary of the 2018 law that created The MLC and the statutory mechanical license Campfire will operate under.

The MLC: how its license works

The Mechanical Licensing Collective's own explanation of what its license covers and how streaming services report and pay under it.

Congressional Research Service: PRO consent decrees

A nonpartisan government research summary of how ASCAP and BMI licenses work and why they exist.