At some point within the last 20 years, reality branched to a fork where people no longer own copies of their favorite music. Instead, we are forced to either listen to a continual stream of advertisements or pay a perpetual leasing fee to even access the music we love and cherish. The moment you stop paying for the service, you lose access to all of your music. The music is only accessible offline if you pay excessive fees, and you cannot utilize the files for personal creative use like a fun family video.

Streaming was touted as a win for artists. The claims were that music artists can now distribute their music easily and make solid money while doing it! These claims proved to be untrue. Artists who do not have access to major labels or massive advertising budgets struggle to get recommended by the streaming service algorithms. Streaming platforms like Spotify pay only $0.001 per minute of music streamed. This means that in order for an artist to make $1, a listener must stream their music for 1000 minutes. To make $1000, artists need their listeners to stream their music for 1,000,000 minutes. To make a reasonable living in America, an artist would need people to stream their music for 5,000,000 minutes every month.

While these numbers are achievable over time, the lack of proper pay compared to traditional revenue sources such as record sales and radio air play means that artists don’t make nearly as much money as they used to from music consumption AND artists who are just beginning and building their fanbase will not be able to make a sustainable living during their development and building phases of their community.

Rather than resign to the terrible streaming model, we here at Happy Place Music refuse to play this terrible game. So, we are creating a new one!

What if there was a way to own our music again? What if instead of spending $15 a month for a perpetual lease we could instead spend $15 a month in direct support of our favorite music artists? What if we could listen to music without any ads or constant attention spamming alorithmic feeds?

Happy Place Music Player does just that: restores ownership to listeners, greatly increases artist revenue, and allows us to listen to music without all of the bloat and hassle.

By adopting a USB based music distribution system, listeners can go to a concert and buy an album for instant playback on the car ride home. They own the album forever, and no mega corporation can cut them off from it. It’s their music now.

Artists can make money from music sales again. To make $1000, an artist can get people to listen to their music for 1,000,000 minutes OR they can sell 100 flash drives with their record. It is much easier to sell 100 of anything than to get someone to spend 1,000,000 minutes doing anything. Even record labels and major artists would prefer selling a million actual copies of their album rather than do a billion streams. It’s literally a 1000x increase in revenue.

Happy Place provides the infrastructure to allow both listeners and artists to live more sustainable lives. Listeners return to ownership, become less dependent on multi-national corporations, and have complete ad-free control of their music on their terms. Artists regain what was thought as lost revenue, they gain access to new creative release methods (such as live recording of concerts and limited physical releases of those concerts THE NIGHT OF THE CONCERT), and have greater control over how people can support their work.

In our own quest to figure out how to monetize our own music recordings, we started asking the question: What happened to cds? Can we play them directly on our iPhone?

There are many smaller artists whom we like to support, and one of the best ways to do so is to buy a cd. The challenge is playing it. CD players have been removed from most physical hardware. CDs take up a lot of space too.

Experiments with the idea for this application started with testing a Samsung DVD burner with the iPhone. It gets power and recognition, but Apple made it so that we cannot actually use it. Same is true for Google and Android phones. Then, the idea came: What about usb flash drives? Turns out, flash drives are a perfectly fine tool to play music. Our phones recognize and allow us to play music files directly from the usb stick. The native methods of doing this are clunky, ugly, and no fun. We then coded a very rough prototype to test the concept which proved successful. Now we are in full development mode.