For years, independent musicians have complained about the same thing on Reddit threads, in artist Discord servers, and at festival afterparties: streaming services pay like absolute garbage, and everyone takes a cut along the way. Spotify? They’re sitting on a $26 billion valuation while paying artists $0.004 per stream, which means an artist needs roughly 360,000 monthly streams just to make minimum wage. DistroKid and TuneCore? They charge annual fees ranging from $25 to $99 just to let you distribute your own music. Even worse, if you’re starting out, every middleman between your bedroom studio and a listener’s headphones is skimming something off the top.

So when SoundCloud announced last week that it’s letting artists keep 100% of their distribution royalties starting at the end of November, the indie music community actually paid attention. And not with the usual cynical eye-roll that greets most music industry announcements.

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