Why I built DADAAUDIO

As a composer and a musician, a lot of things frustrate me.

The life of the ordinary musician is hard. I’m not talking about pop stars. I’m not even talking about the ones doing well. I’m talking about the ordinary, working musician.

I truly believe that if the industry keeps going the way it’s going, music will hit a breaking point. It isn’t sustainable for the people who make it to handle everything alone: clients who never answer, sync deals that make no sense for the artist, global brands paying pocket money for a huge amount of work.

There are a few big companies I want to speak to directly.

Dear Spotify,

I agree: music should be accessible to everyone. But it should also be sustainable for the people who make it. Your model puts every subscription into one pool and splits it by each artist’s share of all streams. So as a paying listener, part of your money goes to the biggest artists on the platform, usually already rich, even if you never play them. Your money doesn’t go to the artists you actually listen to. And since 2024, a track with fewer than 1,000 streams in a year earns nothing at all. It’s a system that widens the gap between the few at the top and everyone else, and pays most artists close to nothing.

Dear Artlist,

You sell royalty-free licences: a few dollars a month, and your whole catalogue is open. Artists share 30% of your net subscription revenue, divided by downloads. One artist who published his numbers went from about 66 cents per download in 2019 to about 30 cents in 2020, because downloads grew faster than subscribers. Every new track makes everyone’s slice smaller. Once again the platform grows, and the artists are left behind.

I believe work is work. That’s why, even though DADAAUDIO starts today as a tool to organise, share and manage your music, I want it to grow into an ecosystem.

I want it to become a sync music marketplace, and one day a streaming platform. I want it to be bigger than a company: a fair economy where the people looking for music and the people making it are both protected.

And about AI. Dear musician, please remember this: DADAAUDIO will never follow the path SourceAudio chose. Since 2025, SourceAudio has licensed millions of tracks on its platform to AI companies as training data. Rights holders opt in, and for many composers the rights holder is a library, not them. We will never sell your music to train AI, not for AI companies’ profit and not for ours. We will never own your rights. And we will fight to protect you from an economy that asks you for everything and gives you almost nothing back.

We’re going to become a giant. We’ll build strategic alliances with the people and organisations who protect musicians’ rights. Music should stay something everyone can enjoy. It should never become servitude for the people who make it.

— Daniel Angelucci, composer and founder