FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

We are indie musicians and indie music lovers in Seattle, WA. We’ve launched a new music platform designed for indie artists and their fans. Indio combines a fun and intuitive music discovery and listening experience with sleek artist portfolios and a first-of-its-kind integrated digital tip jar.

Indio is an independent, Public Benefit Corporation. We are not funded by Venture Capital or owned by a larger parent company and, as such, have no obligation to outside investors or motivation to maximize profits at the expense of our mission or our artists.

Indio is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, a legal business designation that allows us to consider stakeholders, morals, and a mission of public benefit in the making of business decisions.

Indio’s mission is to “revalue” music. Music’s devaluation began the moment that digital recording replaced physical recordings. Entire industries have been built around exploiting the easy access to digital music. At Indio, we believe that music has value and that artists should be fairly and directly compensated for their songs by the people who listen to them.

Our wider public benefit mission is to reduce the environmental impact of the music industry by providing independent artists with a source of income outside of the now common, carbon-heavy sources of merchandise sales and touring, and to reduce the overall digital carbon footprint of streaming by operating a platform that eliminates incentives for stream purchasing (fake streams).

We consider the artists whose music populates our platform to be stakeholders in our company. We have made a commitment to help our artists further their creative pursuits and to reach new audiences. As such, every business decision we make is informed by this responsibility. In addition, five percent (5%) of all Indio profits will be placed into an Artist Development Fund to be awarded, via grant, back into our community of artists each year.

• Indio is only for indie artists. So, you’ll never see Taylor Swift or Beyonce here. (Unless they drop their labels! Call us, Tay & Bey!) Indio is a place for indie fans to discover and support independent artists in an ethical and sustainable way.
• Most streaming services offer listeners access to their entire catalog for an unsustainably small monthly fee. It’s a model that only benefits a few major label and commercial artists who are able to command massive audiences. It’s not a workable model for independent artists who are just starting out or for those who write music that appeals to a smaller, more niche audience base.
• Indio’s business model cuts out the distribution middleman and provides a high quality platform for smaller artists to showcase their music to, and more effectively monetize, an audience of indie music fans.
• Listeners are provided with a fun Quick Pick discovery tool and intuitive listening platform, plus the ability and incentive to easily tip the artists whose music they love.
• Listeners can listen and pay in the same place and pay only for the songs or the artists of their choice, rather than into a pool that is divided up in a winner-takes-most fashion.
• Indio is artist-owned, prioritizes indie artist needs, and gives back to its artist community through an Artist Development Fund.

While we’re focusing our launch on Seattle and the greater PNW area, any indie artist who lives in the US can sign up for Indio. We plan to extend our service outside the US eventually, but are intentionally taking a slow launch approach in order to make sure we’re getting it right for our artists before growing to other regions.

Probably! Most artists are. But for our purposes, the definition of independent is that you are not represented by a major record label or contracted in an exclusive publishing deal with anyone, and you own all of the rights to your own music.

Yes!...IF your label is truly independent and not a subsidiary of or in any way related to one of the major labels, you are not contracted with a publisher, AND you represent ten or fewer artists. We plan to eventually increase this number in order to include larger independent labels, but, for the time being, our focus is on individual independent artists.

Yes! We know that many independent artists release music under multiple band or project names. Pro members accounts are available for up to 10 artists per account.

Yes! You can try Indio for as long as you like without upgrading to a Pro Membership. However, hosting a platform is expensive! So, free accounts can only upload a total of four songs with one song at a time in discovery rotation, and Indio will take a commission of 15% on earnings to cover the hosting costs of music uploaded by free accounts. It’s a great option for new artists just starting out, and you can upgrade to Pro at any time.

• You may ONLY upload music to which you own all rights (see our full distribution agreement). That means no covers, no samples. Period.
• Indio is not a place to upload demos, scratch tracks, works in progress, or anything but professional quality, mastered individual musical tracks. Think of your music as your product and Indio as your storefront. You shouldn’t put anything in your store that you don’t think listeners would be willing to pay for. Files with quality issues can be reported and removed from the service.

We’re a new platform, starting from scratch, and it’s going to take a lot of hard work and a bit of time to build up our community, but we believe that if we provide a valuable service for indie artists and a great discovery and listening experience for fans, then our platform will grow steadily.

But don’t forget, indie musicians are some of the biggest indie music fans and supporters around! Every new artist on the platform is a potential new fan.

Indio is a royalty-fee service. We do not collect money from listeners for streams. Listeners pay artists via the built-in digital tip jar in the following ways:

By Song:

Listeners can “preview stream” in full, any available song on Indio twice, for free. On the third attempt at streaming, the listener will be notified that they must “tip” the artist a minimum of $2 (or 20 tokens) in order to play the song again. Listeners can tip either by purchasing in-app tokens and awarding those tokens to artists or, if the artist has set up a Stripe account in-app, the listener may tip them directly via credit card payment. Once the listener has tipped a song a minimum of $2 (or 20 tokens), they may listen to the song on Indio as many times as they like thereafter.

By Artist:

Each artist has an in-app portfolio page that can be reached via URL or QR code. Each portfolio page has a “tip” button at the top. Display your URL on social media or your QR code to audiences when you play live. Think of it as your digital guitar case for people to throw dollars into during your performance.

Of course! While our goal is to become the only platform that an indie artist might need, we understand that it’s going to take us a little while to get there.

We’d love to hear what else you’re looking for in a platform! Let us know at hello@indio.stream