I have spent most of my life inside music. Playing it, recording it, putting other people’s records out, driving five hours to a room with forty people in it. I have paid for other artists’ studio time and helped press records that were never going to sell. I would do nearly all of it again.

But I want to be straight with you about where it left me. After all of that, I still cannot fund the work I actually want to make — the records, the videos, the film. The money to do any of it properly has never once come out of the music itself.

It is not that nobody is listening.
It is what a listen is worth.

A play on a streaming service pays the rights holder somewhere between a third and half a cent. Not the artist — the rights holder, which is whoever the recording belongs to, before the distributor takes its share. And on Spotify, since 2024, a song earns nothing at all until it has been played a thousand times in a rolling year.

Most songs ever recorded never get there. They are not failures. They are just too small to be worth counting, and the system is built so that being small costs you everything.

So the platforms are not going to fund the next volume. There is no version of this where the streams quietly add up and one day it works. I stopped waiting for that.

What can fund it is simpler and much older: a lot of people each giving something they will not miss, directly, with nobody standing in between. A dollar from you is worth more to this project than a few hundred plays, and it arrives all at once, from a person, with a name attached to it.

That is the whole idea. One million people, one dollar each. Not because a dollar is a lot — it is not, that is the point — but because a million people deciding the same small thing together is.

Somebody you know has already done it, and thought you might want to as well. That is the only way this travels. There is no marketing budget behind it and there is never going to be one.

Joey