The new era music industry

Music doesn’t have a proper home on the internet. The songs are on streaming apps, the music videos on YouTube, their bio on Wikipedia, the setlists on setlist.fm, the tickets on Ticketmaster, the merch buried three clicks deep on a site nobody visits. Various companies each own a sliver of every artist, spread across all corners of the internet.

I spent all my internet using years wondering why nobody just built a one stop shop for all music. Then I realized why: hosting music means licensing, and licensing economics are so brutal that even Spotify barely turns a profit. The money that’s supposed to hold music together is the thing keeping it in pieces — and it’s the same reason most musicians I know can’t pay rent from their music.

So I took my notes from the past 15 years and with the help of AI finally advanced enough, built it. My ideas with AI handling the infrastructure.

It’s called Ear Clef, and it’s live right now.

Every artist gets one page, their music, videos, full discography, setlist history, shows, merch, story, all gathered in one place. A feed with no addicting “doom-scroll” style algorithm: just the artists you care about and everything that relates to them; new releases, press, tour announcements, new merch and so on. Another fun feature is a globe you can spin to explore a century of music from every country on Earth.

And underneath it, a different deal:

• Fans support artists directly. The money goes from the fan to the artist. I don’t touch it and I don’t take a cut.
• My default is to have no auto-renews on my pages. If you love an artist, you choose them again next year, on purpose. I encourage every artist here to do the same, and the platform makes honest expiry the default, but each artist decides how they charge. Whatever they choose is labeled clearly, so fans always know the deal before they pay.
• Artists set their own price, own their own pages, own their fan relationships.
• Rest is built in. Artists set their own rhythm. Six months on and six off, or whatever their life needs. The promise to fans isn’t content forever; it’s honesty about the season.

What a subscription can actually be

When the money goes straight from fan to artist, being a subscriber stops meaning “access to content” and starts meaning a place in someone’s creative life. Every artist offers what fits them, it’s a menu of ideas to engage fans, not a checklist:

• New work as it happens — demos, b-sides, sketches, the stuff that usually dies on a hard drive
• The next album early, and the back catalog to keep
• The stems, to remix or pull apart and learn from
• Tabs and how-to-play videos, taught by the hands that wrote the part
• Live video hangs and lessons with the band
• Members-only merch, and real discounts on the rest
• Fan-made merch and art — artist-approved, profits split with the fans who made it
• Presales, ticket discounts, early entry
• Shows live-streamed when you can’t be there, or humble live streams from their living room
• Meetups and takeovers in real life
• Contests worth entering: design the tour flyer for your city, cut the music video, remix the single, with your name on it

Read that as a fan and you’d pay for it. Read it as an artist and you realize how much you’ve always had to give, the current music industry just never gave you a place to offer it.

Three words have been under all of this since before I had a name for it: transparency, creativity, community. That’s the whole compass.

What I want

I’m a working musician, not a tech company. I built this with the help of AI (and a lot of late nights) because I got tired of waiting for someone else to.

If you’re an artist— especially independent — there’s a home here for you. Come claim your artistic universe.

If you’re a fan, through Ear Clef you can actually connect with the artists you love and watch what a feed looks like when nobody’s farming your attention.

And if you run a platform— Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple, whoever — I’m not hiding any of this. Take these ideas. Honest expiry, direct pay, artist-set rhythm. Build them into what you already have. Millions of artists would benefit tomorrow. And if you want help doing it right, hire me. I’ve thought about this for over fifteen years and I’ll consult for anyone serious about it.

I care more that this exists than that I own it. With the caveat that my goal is to cut out the middle man as much as possible, because historically, middle men have undeservingly taken the lion’s share of profits making artists feel like slaves and fans feel like a number.

There is no ultimate music destination. I’m building one anyway.

earclef.com — come find me.