Music without the black box. Everything about how money and music move through Walled Garden, in plain language.
A curated, artist-owned music streaming co-op with published costs. One $10 subscription, a human-approved catalog, and payouts that follow each listener’s actual listening. Walled Garden is not trying to be another extractive streaming service.
Each $10 subscription flows through a transparent waterfall: payment processing → infrastructure/storage → required licensing, admin, legal, and accounting costs → a capped operating reserve → your artist pool. The pool is then divided only among the artists you actually listened to that month.
Most streaming services use pooled payouts: your money goes into one giant pool and is paid out by platform-wide popularity. On Walled Garden, if 50% of your qualified listening was one artist, they get 50% of your artist pool. Your money never subsidizes music you never played.
Payment processing fees (what Stripe actually charges, not an estimate, wherever possible), an infrastructure estimate per subscriber, and a capped operating reserve. Every deduction appears on your monthly receipt, and cost assumptions are published.
Because $8.36 is the floor, not the goal. Of the $1.64 deducted: ~$0.59 is what the payment processor charges (annual plans and bank payments will shrink it), ~$0.30 is a conservative streaming-infrastructure estimate (adjusted to actual costs monthly), and ~$0.75 is the capped operating budget: it pays the small team of humans who run the garden every day (curation, engineering, fraud review, support, legal) and keeps runway so we never need extractive investors. The cap is published, its level is part of member governance, and what it funds appears in every quarterly report. For comparison: on pooled platforms, many artists net 15 to 30% after labels and distributors. Here, 83.6% of your money goes directly to your artists, and the number is designed to rise.
Walled Garden is designed so more of your $10 can reach artists. When subscriptions are purchased through some app stores, platform commissions can significantly reduce the amount available for artists. To preserve the artist pool, Walled Garden subscriptions are handled directly through our website where possible.
Every listener’s monthly pool is allocated across the artists they played (30+ second qualified plays). Allocations aggregate into monthly artist payouts, reviewed by staff and paid out with full history visible in the artist dashboard.
Walled Garden is not an open-upload platform. Every artist is approved by a human before publishing. This protects listeners, artists, and the integrity of the payout system.
No artist joins Walled Garden without human review. Staff verify the artist is a real human-led project, the catalog is coherent, rights are plausible, and there are no signs of fake identities, stolen work, or slop farms.
Walled Garden approves artists, not every song. Once vetted, artists release music without waiting for staff approval every time. Trust comes with accountability: if a release is reported or flagged, Walled Garden can hide it, investigate, suspend the artist, and withhold payouts when necessary.
Walled Garden does not ban AI as a creative tool. AI may be used in production, composition, sound design, or mixing as long as the project is human-led, rights-cleared, and not deceptive. Not allowed: stolen voices, unauthorized clones, fake artist identities, anonymous mass-upload catalogs, and AI music uploaded at scale to exploit the payout system.
The payout model does most of the work. There is no shared pool, so a stream can only move money from the listener who played it: a bot account spends $10 to collect $8.36 of its own money back, a guaranteed loss, and a fake artist cannot reach anyone else’s subscription. On top of that structure: plays under 30 seconds never count, muted autoplay never counts, artist self-listens never count, and extreme daily volumes or tight single-track loops are flagged for human review before money moves. What remains, like stolen payment cards or hijacked accounts, is reviewed by humans each month before payouts go out.
Member artists vote on major policy: payout formula changes, reserve caps, AI policy, admission standards, grants. One artist-member, one vote, never weighted by streams or audience size.
The founding mission is written into a versioned charter. Constitutional changes, like a sale or a change to the payout model, follow a stricter process than everyday policy votes, and any use of that process is explained to members unless legal or privacy reasons prevent it. The full governance structure is published on the co-op page.
Not a piracy platform. Not a major-label catalog replacement (yet). Not an AI music farm. Not a charity. Not a normal black-box streaming service. Not an open-upload slop platform.