DeepTune started with an argument.

DeepTune is a curated catalogue where independent artists release the music they want to make. Artists apply rather than upload, and every release is chosen by a person. The artist sets the price. You buy a release once and keep access to it, through your account, on the web and on your phone. The artist keeps 100% of their listed price. Our margin is paid by the listener, added once at credit top-up. Your money goes to the person whose music you actually listen to.

The catalogue is small on purpose. The interface is quiet on purpose. There is no recommendation feed because there is no algorithm here that wants you to listen longer.

The argument underneath this is that music has lost perceived value, and that the world around the music, meaning the artist's character, their context, the visual and editorial environment a release exists in, is as much a part of what people pay for as the audio file itself. DeepTune is the bet that a defined audience is willing to pay to have that back.

As a musician I have watched my own work get streamed thousands of times and pay out the equivalent of a coffee. I read every honest explanation for why that is, and I stopped finding any of them acceptable.

Streaming is not bad. Streaming is fine for the train ride. It is a bad place to pay for music. The pro-rata pool is structurally rigged against the long tail, and the platforms have replaced labels as the gatekeepers of discovery without taking on the responsibility labels used to carry. The money my listeners pay every month is not flowing to me. It is flowing into a single pool, distributed proportionally to the catalogues that dominate the global feed.

So I built somewhere else.