When Tim Quirk ran content programming for Google Play in the early 2010s, he sat across the table from record labels, music publishers and movie studios four times a year for quarterly business reviews. These meetings, he says, “were like funerals.” Legacy entertainment was struggling, and executives blamed tech companies like Google for their problems. But Quirk’s job was by no means joyless; Google’s meetings with app-based gaming companies, on the other hand, “were f–king parties,” he says.
“Man, they loved us,” says Quirk of the developers behind hit games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush Saga. “They were minting money. So I spent the four years I was at Google trying to figure out, ‘What do these guys know that these other people don’t?’ I was arrogant enough to think I’d figured it out.”
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Quirk decided that the gaming industry’s secret sauce was free apps that, once downloaded, offered in-app purchases and advertisements — and he wanted to bring that model to his first love, music. A musician himself and member of the alt-rock band Too Much Joy, Quirk had helped launch the early streaming service Rhapsody in the 2000s.
His first crack at this idea was Freeform, a startup that turned artists’ albums into individual apps, which was acquired by digital content company Zedge in 2017. Now, Quirk, currently senior vp of product at Zedge, is revamping Freeform for the next generation with the new superfan streaming app Tapedeck.
Tapedeck is a pay-as-you-go music streaming service aimed at increasing artist royalty payouts. It has a direct fan support model reminiscent of Bandcamp but with one key addition: streaming.
Quirk is hoping to fill a hole that’s opened in the superfan market when Bandcamp shrunk its operations after being sold twice in two years, first to Epic Games and then to Songtradr. And by adding a streaming component, Tapedeck is confronting the hotly debated topic of low royalty payouts on platforms like Spotify and YouTube.
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While streaming services maintain that they’ve injected huge sums into the music business, Quirk is among the many artist advocates who complain that royalty rates are still too low; Spotify pays a fraction of a cent per stream, and, under a new model adopted by the streamer in 2023, royalties don’t kick in until a song reaches 1,000 streams.
On Tapedeck, every song is worth at least a penny per stream from the very first listen. Quirk is betting on the idea that, when packaged the same way as an app like Candy Crush, paying artists what they’re worth can turn a profit. “If you go after superfans — people who proactively want to pay the artists more than they are asking for because they want to support musicians — there’s at least a $20 million a year business to be built,” Quirk says.
How does Tapedeck work?
It works so simply that I have to explain it over and over again to people I want to license content from because they can’t get their heads around how easy it is. It’s pay as you go. There’s no subscription fee. We use a virtual currency. And most importantly, licensers set their own rates. They say, “This is what I want per download. This is what I want per play.” The floor is a penny per play. We will not let you charge less than that. If you want to charge more than that, you can, if you think users will pay it.
Users redeem virtual currency for plays. We start everybody off with 50 free plays — we’re subsidizing the 50 free plays and the licensors are getting paid from the very first play. That’s a user acquisition cost for us. And then when the users run out of plays, they have a choice. They can just buy plays in packs. But if you don’t want to make the in-app purchase, you go to our offer wall. You can watch rewarded videos. Every rewarded video will earn you 10 free plays, because that’s what we’re getting from the advertisers. And then if you want more plays than that, but you still don’t want to pay money, you can just scroll through our offer wall like you can in any mobile game. And anytime you buy music in Tapedeck, there’s the price that the licensor is asking for, but then there are buttons to pay 2x, 3x or 5x, or you can enter your own amount.
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What’s the current status of the Tapedeck launch?
We launched on iOS as a pilot program in September. We came out of pilot in January. It was only iOS and U.S. originally, but we’re slowly turning on more countries. It’s available in the U.K. now, and web and Android are still to come.
What inspired you to develop this model for streaming compensation?
I’m on record rather publicly and loudly saying people are wasting their energy trying to get Spotify and YouTube to pay more. I’m not saying they shouldn’t. They absolutely should pay more, and you should expend some energy trying to raise those rates. But you can double those rates and it’s not going to have that much effect on a musician’s bottom line. So what I’ve been telling people for decades now is you need to look at your revenue as a musician, as a label, as a music manager, the same way mobile gaming companies do. It’s not about how many units you sell — it’s about your average revenue per user (ARPU). And you should be trying to grow that all the time. Now, your ARPU from Spotify and YouTube users is going to be pretty low. But that’s okay, because those are basically free funnels for getting people into your ecosystem. And what you want to do is get people from every other source where they can hear your music to your own [ecosystem]. This is what Freeform was trying to do; the industry term is superfans, but to me, it’s more than that. It’s people who are more deeply engaged than average. So it’s really just above-average fans.
What do you think it is about Tapedeck that is going to be successful at engaging those “above-average fans”?
We are paying as much as anyone possibly can. It’s an 80-20 split, and the licensors set their own prices. The main thing is, we are here to make it easier to make a living making music. That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what excites me. Even though I’ve been very publicly on the record saying, “Don’t waste your energy yelling at Spotify for their low payouts,” that’s different than, “We’re just not going to pay you for the first 1,000 streams.” I do not understand why people have not descended on Stockholm with pitchforks and torches. That should be illegal. That’s insane.
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How do you see Tapedeck in relation to existing superfan services like Bandcamp?
My elevator pitch for Tapedeck is it’s a Bandcamp that also monetizes streams. Bandcamp was briefly the one success story in the indie music world in that it was a technology company that musicians loved. I loved, past tense, them as much as any other musician did. Then they had the two dismal sales, and they laid off all the editorial staff. It’s so hard to get goodwill with musicians when you’re a technology company, and that has just been painful. So I guess if I’m playing nice with some of my friends who still work at Bandcamp, I would say we’re complementary, because they’re a download store, and we’re that plus a streaming service. But if I’m a little more realistic, we want to eat their lunch. We’re stepping into the breach.
What does the Tapedeck catalog look like now?
It’s all indie. I’ve told the Zedge board, I told all the developers: I’ve been here before, it’s this chicken and egg problem. In order to attract users to a new service, you need a catalog. In order to get the catalog, you need a bunch of users already. So that’s why we started out indie only. The first distributor we signed up was Symphonic. We’ve added a few more since then. The last time I was going out and licensing from independents, it was a lot easier than it is now. There’s been so much consolidation. Now, even when it’s an indie distributor, they’re often owned by a major label. The major label has to approve any new deal, and they won’t do it if you don’t write them at least a $500,000 check, which we’re not doing. So we’re focusing on the distributors we can get, and we’re going to be striking some individual artist deals with some bigger names — people who own their own masters. Our plan is to demonstrate there’s a better way with the artists who are willing to do it, and then wait. And once we get enough people making enough money from this, the major labels are going to come to us and knock on our door.
What is Tapedeck’s position on AI music?
We’re still figuring it out, because I’ve learned, to my detriment, that you can’t really be that nuanced when you’re speaking publicly. Social media in particular favors Manichaean worldviews — everything’s either all good or all terrible. And right now, the artist community thinks AI is all terrible. And I think it’s more subtle than that. As an artist, I find AI a useful tool. I do not ever want a song that was created by Suno. But [when used in the songwriting process] it saves so much time and money. We don’t have an articulated policy at the moment, just internal debates. But my personal assumption of where we’ll land is that we will take a dim view of wholly AI-created music, but we will not take such a dim view of music that people used AI in various ways that are timesaving.
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Looking a year ahead from now, where do you see Tapedeck?
Well, there’s what I want, and there’s what will probably happen. What I want is to have enough name artists in there who control their own masters who have licensed to us that at least one major has come knocking already, and so you’re starting to see a critical mass of content that the average music fan, not just the above average music fan, will have heard of. Realistically speaking, it’s probably going to be 18 months before the major labels actually get there.
What do you hope for five years from now?
Spotify is paying from the first listen, and they’re paying a penny per play because everybody had to match us.
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