Path 01 · For makers
However you make it: voice and guitar, a bedroom studio, a prompt and a hundred careful takes, or all three. This page walks the road from finished song to paid maker, one step at a time, and nobody along it grades your method.
First, how do you work?
The welcome changes; the road does not. All three doors lead to the same eight steps below.
Voice, hands, instruments, a room. The mark records that your work is handmade, in your own words, and the listeners who look for exactly that can find you by it. The steps below fit around how you already work; none of them ask you to change it.
A person drives; tools help where you point them. That is how a great deal of music gets made this decade, and this path treats it as ordinary, because it is. The mark lets you say which parts came from where, once, and be done with the question.
The tools generate; you direct, select and shape. Directing well takes taste, patience and a lot of discarded takes, and this path gives that work a name and a place to stand. Say what it is on the mark, and the steps below read the same for you as for anyone.
The maker's road
Fill in the Maker's Mark once: how the work was made, in your own words. It answers the AI questions every service now asks, from streaming credit fields to chart entry forms, so you write the facts down one time instead of five.
Sell album packs and downloads from your own page and keep the margin (the part of each sale left after costs). A worked pricing ladder from the community: A$20 for one album, A$35 for two, A$45 for three. The streaming services can come second; your own door opens first.
A distributor (the service that puts your song on Spotify and Apple Music) is a contract as well as a button, and the yearly fee is the least of it. Three questions decide it, and none of them is the price. What happens to your catalogue the day you stop paying: does it stay up, or does it come down? Can you cancel an extra without taking your own release down with it? Can they train a model on your work, and did you ever agree to that?
Read the exit before you read the price. The Terms Table puts those answers side by side, with the source noted against each fact, so the choice is made on the terms rather than the sticker.
Enter the People's Chart, where listeners vote and every entry wears its mark. The method is published and the rules are the same for every maker, whichever door you came through.
Play live with billing that says what the act is, so punters know what they are buying before they buy. Ticketing through fair-fee operators runs around 4% plus A$0.99 a ticket: on a A$30 ticket that is about A$2.19 in fees, and the rest stays at the door.
Am I allowed to sell this? What happens to my songs if I stop paying? The Rights Engine gives plain-language answers with the exact rules quoted: information, never legal advice. Registering with collecting societies (the bodies that gather royalties when radio stations and venues play your songs) is a choice with its own timing, and the choice stays yours.
Small operators can negotiate together at the bargaining table. A union for gigs exists too: Musicians Australia, about A$196.57 a year including public liability insurance (cover if someone is hurt at your show). That works out under four dollars a week.
Pooled channels with the split rules published, so a share of a bigger audience flows back to the makers in it. The Pool is where that lives. taking shape
What the road lowers
The enabler, not the product
The paperwork on this road does not need your evenings. The release forms, the album-pack page and the first legal question can all be drafted by your own AI assistant working from the mark's data, ready for you to check and sign. Your hours go to the music.
Start at step one: the Maker's Mark. Or step back and see how the whole machine fits together.