Artist FAQ

Yes — masters, compositions, and every other right. The Terms say it plainly: “you retain full ownership of that content. We do not claim any ownership rights to your work.” We take no share of your copyrights, no publishing, and no administration rights.

Completely non-exclusive. The licence you grant is explicitly non-exclusive. Keep every distributor and every platform you are already on — nothing changes, and there is no release window or exclusivity period. Founding Artist status does not change that either.

Any time, from your account settings. The licence we hold ends when you delete the content or the account. Two honest caveats: anything already streamed or shared cannot be un-streamed, and we keep backups where the law requires it.

Only what is needed to run the platform: host, store, stream, transcode, make lower-bitrate versions and stems, and power recommendations. The Terms say “solely for the purpose of operating, providing, and improving the Service” — and that is the whole of it.

No promotional licence. If we want to feature you on our channels, we ask you first, every time, and you can say no.

No AI training licence. We do not license uploaded music to train generative-AI models, and we do not permit anyone to scrape the Service for that purpose.

• Song and album sales — 85% of your listed price. Payment-processing fees are added on top of your price rather than taken out of it: you set $5, the buyer pays $5 plus fees, and your share is calculated on the $5.
• Fan tiers — 85%, every month. Tier money is never shared with a distributor or a label.
• Supporter subscriptions — 85% of each subscriber's monthly fee is split among the artists that subscriber actually streamed that cycle. It is their subscription divided by their listening, not one giant pool where the biggest artists take everything. Each song counts up to 10 plays per subscriber per cycle, so nobody can distort a pool by looping one track.

Streaming on its own does not pay per play. There is no fraction-of-a-cent rate here. Streams earn through the Supporter pool above.

No, and the distinction matters, so here it is precisely.

90/10 applies to direct transactions — song sales, album sales, fan-tier subscriptions and tips — for twelve months from the day the key is granted. It reverts to the standard 85/15 automatically after that. The badge and placement are permanent.

Supporter Mode is always 85/15, founding or not. That is deliberate. Supporter money is a shared pool split across every artist a subscriber streamed, so paying some artists 90% out of it would take the difference from the other artists in that pool rather than from us — one artist paying another. So the pool is a flat 85% to artists across the board.

No platform fee beyond the 15% (10% in your founding year). Payment processing is passed to the buyer, not deducted from you.

The one real deduction is at withdrawal: an international bank transfer costs roughly $16–25 flat and comes out of that payout.

Planned, not built. The intention is that ad revenue is distributed per stream alongside the Supporter pool. The rate is not set, the mechanism is not finished, and there is no launch date.

We would rather you plan without it: count sales, tiers and the Supporter share. When it exists you will have the real numbers in writing before it goes live.

Monthly, on the 5th. There is a 90-day hold on new accounts before the first payout.

Payouts have not begun yet — the first artists on the platform will be in the first run.

$100, or ₹1,000 for artists resident in India. Anything below the minimum rolls over to the next run rather than being lost.

Yes. Analytics gives you a ranked list of your fans — name, streams, minutes listened, likes, purchases, whether they are a tier member or follower, and when they were last active — and you can export it as CSV.

Two deliberate limits: fans who have set their profile to private are not listed, and we do not show you per-fan spending. There are no email addresses either — if a listener wants to hear from you directly, that is a conversation they opt into.

No. WAV, FLAC and MP3 all work, at whatever sample rate and bit depth your master is in — we transcode for streaming and keep your original. There is no naming convention to follow.

If an upload fails, it is worth telling us rather than re-encoding your file. Please include the track name and roughly when you tried.

Every upload is transcoded, analysed, and checked against both a copyright database and an AI-detection service. That takes a couple of minutes per track.

If you are an artist uploading your own already-distributed music, a copyright match is expected — it is your record being recognised — and it does not block your release.

No. vlisten does not host AI-generated music at all — not for sale, not for streaming, not inside a fan tier, not as a free release. AI tools used to process a human performance — mixing, mastering, noise reduction, stem separation, pitch correction — are fine and need no declaration. The full policy is here.

A founding key is confirmed by your first upload. Keys that sit unactivated for 30 days return to the pool — there are only a hundred, and they should belong to artists who are actually publishing.

No, and that is on purpose. The programme lives inside the Terms of Service — the same document every artist can read. It means your deal cannot be quietly changed without changing everyone's.

You will also be asked to read and accept the Creator Payout Terms in-app when you switch on monetisation.

Straight answer: the Terms do not currently spell this out, and they should. Our commitment, which we are writing into the Terms: you would get notice, your masters back, and any earned balance paid out regardless of the minimum threshold.

We would rather say that here, plainly, than leave the question unanswered.