Tune2This A City Lights label

For artists

Upload it, price it, get paid for it.

An artist profile on Tune2This is a storefront, a fan feed and a ledger. You keep your masters. You set your prices. Tips reach you in full.

Apply for a profile Book the room first

The artist profile

What you get

Your own storefront

Upload masters, artwork, credits and lyrics. Sell single tracks, bundles, and merch from your page. Set your own prices — $0.99 a track and $2.99 a bundle are defaults, not rules.

Tips, in full

Fans tip any amount from any page. One hundred per cent reaches you — the platform takes nothing and only the card processing fee comes out. Your supporters rank on your own board.

A real ledger

Every sale, split, tip and payout in one statement. Collaborator splits are set once per release and pay out automatically — nobody chases anybody for a share.

Your fan feed

Post to the people who followed you specifically. Run an early listen for your backers before a release goes public.

Radio rotation

Roster releases go into the curated Tune2This rotation, which is programmed by a person in the control room rather than an algorithm.

The room, at roster rates

City Lights on Route 33 — Neve VR60, Studer A827, five work spaces — at rates that only apply to people on the label.

How the money moves

Do we even need a banking setup to sell downloads?

Short answer: not on day one. Longer answer below, because the point at which you do need one is the point at which this stops being a website and starts being a business with other people’s money in it.

Phase 0 — now

Sell through Bandcamp

15%→ 10% after $5k

Zero build. Zero liability. You could be taking money this week.

  • Bandcamp is merchant of record — it owns the sales tax and VAT problem, not you
  • Handles file delivery, receipts, refunds, download re-access
  • Payouts run through Stripe with no payout fee; daily, weekly or monthly
  • Label accounts pay both the label and the artist directly
  • Tune2This links out. The site is the shop window; Bandcamp is the till
Phase 1 — the real build

Stripe Connect

~2.9%+ 30¢ + Connect fees

The moment you want the transaction on your own site with artist splits, this is the answer.

  • Purpose-built for marketplaces: split one payment between platform and artist automatically
  • Artists onboard with their own identity and bank details — you never hold them
  • Payouts in 50+ countries and 135+ currencies
  • Files and delivers 1099s for US sellers over $600 a year
  • The subscription tiers and the studio discount can hang off the same customer record
  • Catch: Stripe is not merchant of record. Sales tax on digital goods stays your problem
If tax scares you

A merchant of record

~5%all-in

Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, FastSpring. They become the seller and carry the tax liability worldwide.

  • No sales tax, VAT or GST registrations for you, anywhere
  • Roughly double Stripe’s fee, and you buy back a whole compliance function
  • Marketplace splits are weaker than Stripe Connect’s — check before committing
The $0.99 problem — read this before setting prices A card processor charges roughly 2.9% plus a fixed 30¢. On a $0.99 track that fixed fee alone is about a third of the sale before anyone is paid. On a $9.99 basket it is under 6%. So single-track pricing only works if you push people into a basket: make bundles the default, set a minimum cart, or sell a prepaid wallet the way arcades sell tokens. This is also the strongest argument for Phase 0 — Bandcamp’s 15% on a single 99¢ sale beats a raw card fee comfortably.

What we would actually do

  1. Launch on Bandcamp links. Prove people buy before building a checkout. No merchant account, no tax registrations, no ledger to get wrong.
  2. Add memberships next, not sales. Recurring revenue on plain Stripe Billing is far simpler than a marketplace, and the membership is where this platform’s real margin is.
  3. Only then build Connect. When there are enough artists that splits and payouts genuinely hurt, that pain justifies the build. Not before.
  4. Keep tips on Connect from day one of Phase 1. Tips are the cleanest possible marketplace transaction — no goods, no tax on delivery, straight through to the artist.
Neve VR60 recording console and DAW screens in the control room at City Lights Recording Studio

Tips

Tips reach you whole.

Tune2This takes no cut of a tip. The card fee comes out and the rest is yours. Fans rank on your board, which is the mechanism that makes people tip again.

On tax — worth knowing, not advice The IRS final rule issued in April 2026 lists musicians, singers and digital content creators among the occupations eligible for the qualified-tips deduction, up to $25,000 a year. That is a deduction against federal income tax on tips you receive; it is not a blanket exemption, it does not remove self-employment tax, and it phases out at higher incomes. Talk to your accountant about your own situation before you plan around it.

Apply

Send us something to listen to.

Every artist profile is reviewed by the label before it opens.