Photo Credit: Songtradr
MassiveMusic has announced a strategic partnership with Vocana to build a new independent music platform built around fairness, transparency, and artist-fan connection. The collaboration combines Vocana’s user-centric payout model with MassiveMusic’s global infrastructure and metadata expertise.
This article was created in collaboration with DMN partner Songtradr.
Based in Nashville, Vocana has been developing a system designed specifically for independent artists and fans. The partnership allows MassiveMusic to manage Vocana’s back-end functions, including ingestion of new releases, AI-enriched metadata, licensing, and rights holder reporting. This ensures a smoother pathway for independent music catalogs while maintaining a fair and direct connection between artist streams and earnings.
“It’s been exciting to educate our distributor partners about how reporting will work and the advantages our model will provide for their artists,” explains Neil Sheehan, President of Vocana. “MassiveMusic has been key in supporting this effort and communicating exactly what rightsholders should expect.”
Vocana’s approach moves away from the traditional pro rata system, which pools subscriber revenue and divides it according to total platform streams. Instead, its user-centric system allocates each listener’s subscription directly to the artists they actually engage with. “A subscriber’s dollars are split between the artists that subscriber listened to,” Sheehan told Digital Music News.
Moving away from the pro rata model used by major digital service providers (DSPs) such as Spotify, represents a critical shift toward fairness in how artists are compensated for their work. The pro rata system aggregates all subscription revenue, with payouts favoring high-volume artists and global hits while marginalizing niche and emerging creators.
User-centric models, by contrast, divide each listener’s subscription among only the artists that individual actually streams, ensuring that fan engagement translates directly into artist income. This approach also better reflects genuine listening behavior, rewards diverse musical ecosystems without favoring one genre over another, and gives independent and mid-tier artists a meaningful share of the market. It aligns economic value with cultural value, empowering artists to grow sustainable careers based on real fan connection rather than gaming playlist algorithms or volume-driven consumption.
MassiveMusic’s involvement ensures Vocana has global-scale reliability and access to more than 33.5 million tracks through its distribution network. This gives indie artists fast, low-latency access to their music worldwide, while MassiveMusic manages usage reporting and ensures accurate payouts that are aligned with Vocana’s fair model.
“At MassiveMusic, we are proud to be able to power platforms like Vocana that are taking a truly fresh approach to supporting independent artists, human curators, and real fan interaction,” says Paul Langworthy, CRO of Songtradr and MassiveMusic. “Vocana’s user-centric model is a bold step forward for independent artists, and we’re proud to support it with our licensing, metadata, and delivery solutions. Together, we’re not just enabling a new platform; we’re helping build a fairer, more sustainable future for music.”
Currently in beta, Vocana is teaming with distributors such as CD Baby and DistroKid to strengthen its catalog and distribution partnerships. A full public launch is expected in early 2026, positioning the platform at the center of a growing shift toward user-focused payments and community-driven discovery—all while offering artists sustainable career growth opportunities driven by real fans.
