Chapter 07
Memberships, payouts, selling tracks, subscriptions, and referrals.
Looking is always free. Artist and venue memberships are paid; a fan account is not.
Searching, browsing and reading are free for everybody, signed in or not. What a membership pays for is being in the directory as a working account.
See what each one includesConnect a payout account in your settings. Identity and bank details go to Stripe, not to us.
Heads up
Starting the process is not the same as finishing it. Until Stripe says payouts are enabled, money cannot reach you — and some things you can sell will not turn on.
Drop Tracks. Upload a single or an album, set a price, and it sells from your profile once your page is filled in and you have 5 demos up.
Drop Tracks turns a release into something buyable on your own profile. A buyer pays, you keep the bulk of it, and the platform's cut comes off the top.
Putting a price on music opens once your page shows who you are and there is work behind it. Anyone can drop music for free from day one; charging for it has a short checklist first.
The moment the last one is done, the price field opens. There is nothing to apply for and nobody to wait on. If you drop something free before then, you can add a price to it later without redoing anything.
About money
You need payouts enabled before you can charge for anything. Without a connected account there is nowhere for the money to go.
Creator subscriptions are earned. There is a bar of demos, claps and fans to clear first.
Creator subscriptions let fans pay you monthly for exclusive work. Unlike everything else on this list, it has to be earned: there is a threshold of posted demos, claps received, and fans, and the checklist in your settings shows exactly where you are against each one.
The reason is that a subscription takes real money from a fan every month. Asking for that before there is anything behind it is how people get charged for a page with nothing on it, and the bar exists so that does not happen.
Worth knowing
The claps and fans halves are the ones that gate most accounts, and they are the halves that come from bringing your existing audience here. That is the intended route, not a side effect.
Share your code. When someone you brought pays, you earn a share of that first payment.
Your profile settings carry a referral link, a referral code, and a QR version of both. The code exists for the times a link does not work — read out at a show, printed on a flyer, handed over in person.
When somebody who arrived through you makes their first payment, a share of it is credited to your balance. It pays out with your normal payouts once it clears the minimum.
About money
Referral earning is a privilege that has to be switched on for your account, and like subscriptions it has a bar to clear. Until then the link still works and still brings people here; it just does not credit anything.
Selling music, subscriptions and referral earning are earned. One page shows what is left.
Most of DemoStop works from the moment you join. Three things open up once you have done a few others, because each one involves somebody else's money.
Your checklists page puts all of them in one place, with a link beside every step to where it gets done. You only see the ones that apply to your account.
Worth knowing
Unlocks are yours to keep. If a number drops later, say you delete a demo or lose a follower, nothing is taken back. And once every checklist is finished, the page goes away.
Tell us with the payment reference. Your money is safe while we look.
Purchases can take a moment to appear while the payment settles. If it has not arrived after that, send us the payment reference from your receipt.
About money
Do not buy it a second time to force it through. That makes two charges to untangle instead of one.
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