ShiftMusic is digital music streaming at its fairest, Based around the hybrid royalty concept of the marriage between 'user-centric licensing' and 'pro-rata'.

Major music streaming services have been utilizing pro-rata since inception and it simply hasn’t presented itself as a fair model for millions of artists worldwide.

Aiming for an open source development environment gives the project the ability to function as a not-for-profit and direct the majority of revenue towards the artists.

Project Shift is entirely about pushing the music industry to the best it can be.

‘user-centric licensing’ in digital music streaming terms means that your subscription fee is spread out through the artists you actively listen to throughout the month. Each artist makes up a part of your overall listening percentage. The more you’ve listened to an artist, the larger cut they get of your subscription.

Individual plays alone aren’t valued in this system but more so the percentage that the artist makes up of your active listening catalog for the month.

Pro-rata in digital music streaming terms means that your subscription fee is placed into a giant pool where the royalties are spread out across the artists on the service, based on the total percentage they make up of listeners on the service.

The flaw is that the artists with the highest listening percentage on the service take much higher royalties per play then your favorite niche artist would.

This results in your subscription fee’s being put to the huge top 40 artists that you may not even be listening to, or support at all.

ShiftMusic aims to utilize these royalty systems with a simple switch that can be toggled at the end of each billing cycle. are you a light user and only listen to a handful of artists each month? or are you a heavy user that listens to tons of artists? with this option you will be able to change the way you distribute your subscription fee.

Acting as non-profit allows us to develop our ecosystem entirely open-source and community driven, without being taken advantage of by investors and bottom dollar corporations. Not to mention provide an industry leading royalty to artists worldwide.

Simple. I'm a musician.

As a first-hand witness to the incredibly poor royalty payouts the current services provide, I did some research and found that it wasn't just the little guys. It was the vast majority.

Digging further online I came across an article Published on September 3, 2015 titled "Backwards Incentives: Why Spotify Gives Your Money To Artists You Don't Listen To" By a man named Sharky Laguana, In this article, Sharky talks about the poor incentives these services provide artists, and a potential better model that could reshape the way royalties work.

"Why hadn't anyone attempted this?" I thought. one startup did a few years ago, but there is little to no resources online on what became of them. So in April 2018 I made the ballsy decision of making such an attempt.

As with any massive, ridiculous idea, I didn't know what I was getting into. Being completely inexperienced and unqualified, I dedicated the next few months to ideas and education (also becoming repeatedly burnt-out). I'd been looking for co-founders the whole way with little to no luck.

Open-source allows the development environment to be entirely community based, while allowing people to work on large scale projects for their portfolios and further their careers.

The global music scene is a multi-billion dollar industry... and an incredibly low percentage of that actually goes to artists.

I've never cared that much for money beyond making a living. With the sheer capacity for automation in technology today, The ability to function as a non-profit in the tech space has never been easier.