ZEDGE reposted this
Hat tip to Billboard for spotlighting Tapedeck this week, but here's why this matters beyond the headline. The debate about Spotify's royalty rates is important, but it's also a distraction. Spotify can double those rates and it won't meaningfully change the economic reality for most working musicians. The bigger opportunity is building ecosystems that capture value from your most engaged fans directly. That's exactly what Tapedeck is doing, and I couldn't be more excited about it. Tapedeck is a superfan streaming app built by Zedge's own Tim Quirk, one of the sharpest minds I know when it comes to fan monetization. The model is borrowed from mobile gaming: pay-as-you-go, virtual currency, rewarded video ads, and in-app tipping at 2x, 3x, or 5x the ask. Every stream pays a minimum penny from the very first listen. Licensors set their own prices. It's an 80/20 split. ZEDGE has been in this orbit since 2017, when we acquired Freeform, the original version of this concept. Tapedeck is that vision maturing in a market that's now ready for it. Bandcamp's two troubled sales left a real vacuum. Independent artists have never had fewer great options for reaching their most devoted fans and getting paid fairly for it. The skeptic's view is that superfan apps are a nice niche but will never achieve meaningful scale. That's worth taking seriously. Convincing users to adopt new payment behaviors is hard, and catalog gaps are a genuine obstacle until the major labels come knocking. But I believe the direction is right. The music business has spent two decades optimizing for reach. The next chapter is about depth: deeper fan relationships, higher ARPU, and platforms that make it genuinely rewarding to be a superfan. Tapedeck is building that. We're just getting started. If you are an indie musician consider Tapedeck as one of your distribution platforms. You can actually make money with us! https://lnkd.in/e2fVFgbQ #Zedge #Tapedeck #MusicTech #CreatorEconomy #Superfans #IndieMusic #ArtistRights #MusicRoyalties #IndependentArtists #UniversalMusicGroup #SonyMusic #WarnerMusicGroup