A Simple Mission
Ensure artists are properly compensated for their work. The difference is simple: spotify pays out ~$2 per subscription to artists each month regardless of the plan, Retrovibed's premium plan will pay out a minimum of $14.
Unlike other streaming platforms that try to minimize payouts to artists and maximize extraction from users Retrovibed is designed to be as efficient as possible to maximize the payout to artists while minimizing the cost to users.
Per Stream Revenue
Instead of having a fixed amount per stream, artists are paid based on the amount of time users spent with their content. If a user spends 80% of their time enjoying a artists content then 80% of their subscriptions profits go to that artist.
This improves the amount of revenue generated per stream for artists relative to current industry practices. We can do this because users are supplying distribution infrastructure by using Retrovibed. Meaning less money for big tech and more for the people actual producing the value.
Shared Storage Revenue
Retrovibed differs from other cloud storage providers by distributing the cost of storing content across all the users who add that content to their library. Since its not a completely even split this simultaneously reduces the cost for each user while generating stable monthly profits for the artist.
And since the storage is essentially at cost users are able to store more content for less than services like apple cloud, dropbox, google cloud.
Why Retrovibed?
| Feature | Tech Companies (Google/Apple/Spotify) | Retrovibed |
|---|
| Payouts to artists | ~$2/month/subscription regardless of subscription tier. | $2-$14/month/subscription |
| Storage Cost | $10/mo for 2TB (Standard) | $6/mo for 2TB (40% cheaper) |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | subscription based limits, we'll remove these once userbase scales up. |
| Ownership | Revocable license (they can delete it) | Permanent Archive (you own the bits) |
| Creator Pay | Fractions of a penny per stream | 100% of profits for indepedent musicians/news, and a minimum of 70% for other content, and stream based payouts on user's content consumption + subscription tier. |
| Privacy | Ad-tracking & Data mining | Zero-knowledge & E2E Encrypted |
| Censorship | Algorithmic, shadowbanning | None. Anonymous, P2P Distribution |
Community-Powered Economics
Corporate tech companies charge you for every gigabyte, even if a million people are storing the same file. When multiple users archive the same media (upload your personal music albums!), our backend deduplicates the data. We pass those savings to you (lower costs) and the creator (direct profit sharing). The more popular the content, the more efficient the system becomes.
Directly supporting Artists
Streaming giants take massive cuts to feed their bottom line. We share the bulk of the profits between the users and artists. By turning storage and subscription fees into creator revenue, your monthly bill becomes a direct investment in the people who make the content you love.
Non-profit
We're self bootstrapping as a non-profit. Which allows us to make decisions that benefit creators and users, not share holders.
Privacy by Default, Not an afterthought
We don't want to read your data. All content is encrypted with keys managed by you.
For those in restricted regions, we've baked in WireGuard VPN, and a SOCKS5 proxy. We focus on user friendly privacy — securing your traffic without impacting your entire system or requiring complicated setup.
Universal Player
From 4K video to high-fidelity lossless audio, your archive is accessible everywhere — Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS. No platform lock-in.