The Declaration
of Independence

When it becomes necessary for the people who make music, and the people who love it, to dissolve the arrangements that have bound them, and to stand apart from a system built on their work but never for it, decency requires that they declare their causes.

These are ours.

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

That music is the unalienable birthright of humankind: it has connected every people in every age, and no company on earth can contain it.

That devotion is real, and can at last be seen.

That a relationship belongs to the two within it,
and to no one else.

That those who make the music
deserve to live from it.

The record of the present industry is one of repeated extraction, every piece of it built to stand between the artist and the fan, and to charge both for the distance. To prove this, we submit these facts to a candid world:

They have kept the record of who loves an artist, and shown it to that artist only in fragments: nameless, faceless, and never the artist’s to hold.¹

They have charged artists to reach the very audiences they built, taking 30% of the royalty on promoted plays as the price of the algorithm’s favor.²

They have set the worth of a listen at $0.003, so that 1,000,000 streams, a height that 97%+ of artists will never reach, returns roughly $3,000.³

They have built a $36+ billion industry on the work of musicians who earn a median of $1,450 a year.⁴

They have decreed that beneath 1,000 streams a year, an artist’s song shall earn nothing at all.⁵

They have taken $22 of every $100 a fan pays for the service of standing in the doorway, and left the artist $8.⁶

They have turned concert tickets into a financial asset: queues that are 96% bots, algorithmic trading at multiples of the price, extracting money from fans and delivering none of it to artists.⁷

They have concentrated ticketing into a monopoly, some 80% of primary sales at major venues under a single company, so that neither artist nor fan reaches the other except through it. That company now stands under a federal antitrust verdict.⁸

They have opened the flood to machine-made music, now 50%+ of all new uploads, near 90,000 synthetic tracks a day: a tide that never sleeps, never bleeds, and never needs to be paid, set beside human artists in the same feed.⁹

At every stage, artists have asked in good faith for fairer terms. Their petitions have been answered by falling rates, by rising fees, and by the instruction to be grateful for the exposure.

This establishes a new reality: an artist with true fans known by name, thriving from their music. A front row earned through devotion. A room whose energy is real, because everyone helped create it.

For every stream, every mile, every friend brought is the same thing: human energy, given freely. And for the first time, it returns to the one who called it forth.

What we give comes back. That is Ekho.