Our mission here at Shoulda Beens is to find all the great “unsigned” bands from the ‘60s through the ‘90s, and share their music and stories with the world.  We are determined, however, to make sure our artists don’t get ripped off by the dot-com version of the music money-go-round once they emerge from the shadows.  That’s why we do not work with streaming platforms to distribute our artists’ creations.  We do it the (slightly) old-fashioned way — by selling .mp3s of the tunes featured in their episodes, for $2.99 each.  That's less than a king-sized candy bar at a gas station — and you get to eat it over and over again!  

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Because our team puts a lot of time into telling our bands' stories and managing their stores, we reserve 40% of the net proceeds from each band-related sale to pay ourselves for our work.  That means, of course, that our artist-partners make 60% of each sale’s net revenue.  So, to be completely transparent about it:  on each $2.99 track, our technology vendors make $0.09, Shoulda Beens makes $1.16, and our artists make $1.74. 

 

Compare that to the $0.003 (yes, you read that correctly) that Spotify pays creators for each “play” of the same song.  To make one dollar in net revenue, that song would have to be streamed about 300 times.  By purchasing that track from the Shoulda Beens store — well, 300 sales would net the band $522.  

 

These sales are the result of hard work on the part of our artists and ourselves, so we both get paid.  The artist gets paid more, just because that’s the right thing to do.  (Our artists are also free to open online stores of their own, selling the same music at whatever price they wish.)

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As Shoulda Beens sales increase, we plan to tilt the 60/40 split even more to our artists' advantage — but for now, we're all sharing a very small pie, and we have to take 40% to keep our doors open.  Rest assured, we have no interest in "leveraging" anybody's creative output to become the next dot-com billionaires.   We just want everybody to be paid fairly for filling the world with great music — whether they wrote and recorded it in the 20th century, or they wrote about, promoted, and sold it in the 21st.