Where Your £9.99 Actually Goes on RAAYDR
A standard RAAYDR subscription is £9.99 a month. Of that, 55% goes to artists, 15% is ring fenced for tastemakers and RAAYDR keeps 30%, each a share of what is left after tax, publishing royalties and card fees. This page shows the full working, because no streaming service tells you what their percentage is a percentage of.
The number nobody publishes
Every streaming service quotes a headline. Almost none of them tell you what that headline is a share of. When a platform says it pays out 70% of revenue, it rarely says whether that is 70% of what you paid, 70% of what is left after tax, or 70% of a global pool you are only a tiny slice of. The percentage is real. The denominator is hidden, and the denominator is the whole game.
So here is ours, in full.
What comes off the top, in order
Three things are taken out before anyone is paid. They come off in this order, and none of them are optional.
VAT. A digital subscription sold in the UK includes VAT. That is a tax, collected on behalf of the government, and it was never RAAYDR's money or the artist's money to split.
Publishing royalties. Songwriters and composers are owed a mechanical and performance royalty on every play, collected through PRS and MCPS. This runs to roughly 16% and it is a legal obligation, not a choice. It exists so that the people who wrote a song are paid when it is played, separately from the people who recorded it. RAAYDR pays it before splitting anything.
Card and payment fees. Taking a card payment, running a subscription and paying creators out all cost money: the card fee, Stripe Billing on the subscription, and Stripe Connect on the payout. These are small per pound, but they are real, and they come out before the split.
What is left, and how it splits
What remains after those three is the distributable amount. On a £9.99 subscription that is roughly £6.49. It splits three ways:
| Share | Who | Of the distributable amount |
|---|---|---|
| Artists | The artists that subscriber actually listens to | 55% |
| Tastemakers | The people whose picks that subscriber acts on | up to 15% |
| RAAYDR | Running the platform, and nothing else | 30% |
The artist share is not divided by total plays across the platform. It is divided by attention: the share of that one subscriber's listening each artist holds. A fan who plays you constantly is worth more to you than one who plays you occasionally, and neither is diluted by a global chart they have nothing to do with.
The tastemaker share is a ceiling, not a fixed pot. A tastemaker earns from it in proportion to the listening they actually drove. Anything nobody earns does not come back to us. It goes to the artists.
Why per fan beats per stream
The pool model is the reason streaming pays so little. Every subscription in the country goes into one bucket, and the bucket is divided by every play in the country. Your most devoted fan and a bot farm draw from the same water. Your fan's £9.99 does not follow their listening. It is averaged across everyone, and the average is dominated by whoever has the most plays, which is almost never you.
Per fan breaks that. Your fan's money is theirs to direct, and it follows their attention to the artists they actually play. The practical difference works out at roughly a hundred times per person, because you are no longer sharing your own fan's subscription with the entire platform.
What this means if you are an artist
Because the money is per fan and not per stream, the useful question is not how many plays you have. It is how many people genuinely listen to you, and how much of their listening you hold.
The comparison that matters is monthly listeners, the figure Spotify for Artists actually shows you, not a per-stream rate. A modest number of real fans on RAAYDR earns the same as a far larger monthly listener count on Spotify, because most monthly listeners heard one track once and moved on. The artist calculator on the artists page lets you put in your own fan count and attention share and see the monthly listener equivalent for yourself.
What we are not doing
No advertising. There is no ad inventory, so nobody's attention is being sold on the side.
No paid placement. You cannot buy your way onto a list or into a recommendation. Tastemakers rise because people act on their picks, not because anyone paid.
No free tier. Playing music requires a subscription. That is deliberate. It is what makes fake accounts pointless, because a subscription costs more than any account could ever extract.
FAQ
- What is the denominator for the 55%?
- It is the distributable amount: your subscription after VAT, publishing royalties and card fees. On £9.99 that is roughly £6.49, and 55% of it goes to artists.
- Why is publishing taken out before the split?
- Publishing royalties are owed to songwriters and composers by law, collected through PRS and MCPS. They are not RAAYDR's to keep or to split, so they come off the top like tax.
- Does RAAYDR keep the unearned tastemaker fund?
- No. Up to 15% is ring fenced for tastemakers, and whatever they do not earn goes to the artists. It never comes back to us.
- Is any of this different on the Day One price?
- The percentages are the same. Day Ones pay £6.99 a month locked forever, so the pound amounts are smaller, but 55% still goes to artists, up to 15% to tastemakers and 30% to RAAYDR, each after the same costs.
This page is maintained as the canonical breakdown of a RAAYDR subscription and is updated as pricing and costs change.
