Welcome to Streamline: First Words From Our Founders
The story behind Streamline, our vision for the future of music, and an invitation to join us in building something revolutionary.
Welcome to Streamline
It took us a little over a year to build what we have today as Streamline but it feels like the culmination of a lifetime of experiences.
Our initial vision has remained simple and unchanged, we wanted to build a direct-to-fan music platform that puts artists first and gives listeners a modern, premium, streaming-like listening experience while respecting privacy.
What exactly does this mean? How have we put artists first? How do you respect privacy and ownership? We are glad you asked.
To start, we created The Streamline Foundation which is a legal nonprofit entity. This means Streamline has no owners and that Streamline cannot redistribute funds (profits) to individuals (like LLCs and for-profit companies); instead the funds must be reinvested into the mission. What does reinvesting back into the mission look like for us? Right now we are hoping to deliver the most artist-friendly payouts from direct-to-fan sales while continuing to build an entire ecosystem that supports it. We want to continue to build out the highest quality music platform that rivals today’s de facto services.
To be fair, as of today, we aren’t exactly there yet. We need your help first. We do not have any funds to redistribute and pay out royalties yet. In fact, we are already in the red with just our resources and infrastructure. So, instead in these early stages of Streamline, we have taken other measures to push our artist first ethos.
The first and most core way we put artists first is by empowering them to retain full and direct control of their content and revenue. Most industry professionals and musicians may know this already, but you cannot simply upload your music to a service like Spotify or Apple Music. There are DSPs (Digital Service Providers) that you either pay per release or in annual memberships for them to distribute your music across various services who then pay-out how their respective companies see fit. We cut out the middlemen here. On Streamline, it will always be free to upload music and distribute it. Right now, if an artist chooses to sell a digital album, we put the power in their hands to choose how much of the album sale they take home. We have implemented a platform fee slider where the minimum percent strictly covers the actual transaction fees and nothing else.
FLOW
In addition to supporting artists financially, we have built out a management dashboard that is flush with features that is suited to support everyone from local hardcore bands to major, global record labels. This is FLOW. FLOW allows artists and records labels to manage every aspect of their public image and content, make strategic decisions using analytics, connect with fans via a private feed of posts with comments, build out a public profile including external links, ability to offer fans and listeners exclusive access to private/unreleased material and incentivize digital album purchases with bonus tracks that are only available when the album is purchased. And that is just for starters.
WAVE
WAVE was built with every type of music listener in mind. It supports the casual listener who wants to browse, discover, and put on a playlist as well as audiophiles and collectors who care about quality and ownership. WAVE is everything you’d expect from a modern, streaming-like listening platform and more.
WAVE offers a familiar, fast, and premium listening experience. You can follow artists and labels, explore new releases, and create, share, and collaborate on playlists with friends. Your Streamlist serves as your personal music library, bringing together saved albums, playlists, and releases in one place.
When you purchase a digital album on Streamline, it integrates seamlessly into your Collection alongside the rest of your music. Purchases also include the ability to download DRM-free files, ensuring that what you buy is truly yours forever. This allows listeners to enjoy the convenience of a streaming-like experience while maintaining permanent access to the music they choose to support.
WAVE apps for iOS (including CarPlay and watchOS) and Android will also be available in the App Store and the Google Play Store very soon.
SOUND
Streamline is comprised of two main sides, FLOW and WAVE but something that we are extremely excited about is SOUND. SOUND is a personal server that a user installs on their personal computer, shares a folder of music (on their computer or a Google Drive) which connects to their WAVE collection with a single click. As long as the app is open in the background of their computer, users can use WAVE from a native app or any browser to listen to their personal music collection from anywhere in the world. For free. And we painstakingly took privacy into consideration while building this. SOUND is more private and more secure than any mainstream tech or app that you might be comparing it to in your head, and we offer ability to fine tune it and use personal tunnels to access your music if you prefer.
SOUND will populate your music’s metadata, let you granularly or in bulk manage your music, but the coolest part is that it integrates right into the entire Streamline ecosystem. You can access your personal music along side with your Streamlist and purchased music. We even built out artist pages for the artists that you have and we don’t yet.
It's the missing piece that no other platform offers (maybe because no other platform respects your ownership the way we do?). We think this is the bridge that Lars Ulrich, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker (they built Napster) have been looking for since 2001.
Why We Built This
We're musicians. We're collectors. We are music lovers. We built this for us.
We built the platform that treats artists fairly and rules to use. We built Streamline because we were tired of waiting. Tired of watching artists get fractions of pennies while platform CEOs… do really bad things with the money they are stealing from demonetizing human artists and rerouting plays to their own AI artists. Tired of being told our personal libraries are somehow separate from our listening lives. Tired of algorithms deciding what we should hear and who should get paid.
Join Us
If you're an artist or a label ready to take control of your work, FLOW is waiting for you.
If you're a listener ready to actually support the artists you love, WAVE is here.
If you're a collector who need a modern UI to listen to your personal library, SOUND is the bridge you've been looking for.
We're just getting started, and we want you to be part of what we're building. We set up a Discord for anyone who wants to participate, and have consistent and direct access to us while we built this platform together.
Welcome to Streamline. Let's make something revolutionary together.
— The Streamline Team