Watch Out Spotify, A New App Is on Deck

Selena Fragassi

Tue, June 9, 2026 at 12:30 PM UTC

As the growing concerns about streaming services started to sound like a broken record, Tim Quirk wanted to do something to fix it. In September, the veteran music tech executive launched a pilot of a new app called Tapedeck , a music store and streaming service that was built for music artists and the fans that want to support them.

Unlike other major providers, there are no forced subscriptions and no tiny margins to contend with. Fans simply pay as they go, and every time they press play, an artist sees dollar signs. Because unlike the fractions of a penny most artists currently receive per stream, Tapedeck guarantees one whole penny per play, plus a dollar for every track download, and $10 for any album download—and those are just the minimums. Artists can also set their own rates and rack up more earning potential with additional payouts for every app installed by one of their fans.

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"My ultimate goal is to make a penny per play the floor rather than the ceiling for online streaming royalties," says Quirk, "and I know it can work." The Tapedeck founder has proof of concept from a long history in music tech, previously leading operations at Rhapsody and Google Play Music before founding his own company Freeform Development in 2014. That company built artist-specific apps for the likes of Lil Wayne and Rob Thomas that took the freemium monetization model that gaming companies like Candy Crush used and applied it to music. It was incredibly successful, earning artists 5 cents to 13 cents per play. By 2018, Freeform was acquired by Zedge, which used the concept to help sustain their community of visual artists. But last year, Quirk approached the team with a new music concept that went wider than Freeform did, and thus Tapedeck was born.

In addition to his tech acumen, though, Quirk also comes at his latest launch from a very helpful perspective—that of an artist, because he is one of those, too.

In the '80s, Quirk found his first calling as the singer of the New York alt rock band Too Much Joy, who were signed to Warner Bros. and saw myriad changes as the music industry moved from physical to digital and radio to apps. "By the end of 1999, I was convinced that streaming was the future. It was clear that anything you ever wanted was going to be available at your fingertips. And ideally, that would be packaged in a way that you could monetize for the artists," says Quirk. "Frankly, I'm kind of depressed that it hasn't worked out that way. … Maybe everyone else knew capitalism was going to capitalism. But I'm 61 years old now, and I don't want to go out without trying to build a better streaming music service for musicians."

While Tapedeck is showing much promise in that regard, there's still work to be done. For now, it's only available on iOS in select countries including the U.S., Canada, and Mexico (with an Android option and a web-based platform in the works). And Quirk and his team are also focused on ramping up licensing deals to grow its music catalog, which today sits at 70,000 artists and just under 1 million tracks. Tapedeck works with both distributors and licensors as well as artists that control their own masters. Some of the most recent additions include the new They Might Be Giants album and tracks from Okkervil River's Will Sheff. "We're also really good with soul, and hip-hop and Jamaican music are pretty well represented."

But there's more to come, says Quirk. "It's the classic chicken and egg problem where you can't get users until you have a catalog, and no one wants to license the catalog until you can demonstrate you have significant users," he explains. "And sure, you can fast track all that by writing massive advance checks and agreeing to unsustainable business terms, but we're not doing that. I've been in this business too long to strike unsustainable deals, which is why we're starting with indies. We want majors to come to us rather than the other way around."

Below, Quirk shares more about how Tapedeck benefits both fans and artists, why it's great for music discovery, and the reason why the team wanted an analog brand name for something they hope will carry the music industry into the future.

Walk us through how Tapedeck works for users and how it differs from traditional streaming models.

Tapedeck is a pay-as-you-go music download and streaming service. You don't have to pay anything to start playing around with it, and you can preview a song for 30 seconds before any credits are deducted, so in that regard it is very focused on discovery. We also start everybody off with 50 free plays (and I should note we're paying for all of those, so if you're a licensor, you get paid from the very first play; we don't make you subsidize our free user acquisition). Then when a user runs out of plays, or if they want to buy a song that costs 100 credits, there are a couple of choices. You can buy packs of credits with virtual currency where you get 100 plays for $1, 500 plays for $5, and so on. But if you don't want to do that, you can watch a rewarded video that earns you 10 plays, or you can scroll through our offer wall or find games to play that can build your wallet.

How do artists and licensors benefit from the Tapedeck model?

It's actually so simple that when I have my initial conversations with label reps or distributor reps, they don't believe it. They're looking for the loophole. But it's really straightforward. As a licensor, you set your streaming rate, you set your download rate for tracks and for albums, and then we give you 80% of whatever the user pays. And those prices they set are the floors, not ceilings. Because just like Bandcamp, fans can't pay less than the artist is asking for, but they can type in a higher amount. We also have an affiliate program where we'll give any artist, label, or distributor, or anybody who has an audience of music fans, a custom URL where we can track every install of Tapedeck that they drive. So, if you drive 10,000 or 100,000 of your fans to us, you're going to get a dollar for every one of those who install Tapedeck before they even play a single one of your tracks.

Tapedeck's homepage. (Courtesy of Tapedeck)

How did your experience as a recording artist inform what you wanted to do with Tapedeck?

As artists, we have so little control and we get so little money. Unless you're already a superstar, you're pretty well fucked these days. Touring is getting harder, everybody wants a cut of your merch sales, and it's getting harder to make a living making music by doing all the things that worked in the '90s so you have to reinvent. While Too Much Joy never broke up, we all got day jobs around 1999 when we were starting to have kids. I was late to the corporate world, but I joined Listen.com, a startup here in San Francisco before Google even existed. Their mission at the time was to become the Yahoo of internet music, which sounds ridiculous now, but it made sense back then. And I envisioned a future where streaming seemed like it was going to be great for people like my band who had small but devoted fan bases. I guess I was a little naïve. I never foresaw a world where Spotify could just decree they're not even paying you for the first 1,000 plays, which is just nuts. It's criminal. But I've been very vocal with artists that it's not worth their energy complaining about how little Spotify pays. I mean, you should complain. They should pay more, but you could double that and it's not going to change the average musician's life. Instead, they should focus on getting people into their own ecosystems, which is what we encourage with Tapedeck.

The freemium gaming concept is an interesting way to help monetize music streams. How did you know it would work?

At Freeform Development, we were seeing an effect with this model where you give the app away for free. People can play an entire album once a day for free before the tracks lock, and then you have to take some action to unlock them, which could be purchasing the album. Or it could be redeeming an offer from an offer wall, just like freemium games have. And the reason we did that is because when I worked at Rhapsody and Google Play, I knew our marketing departments were paying $15 to affiliates for anyone that could get into the top of a subscription free trial, and I also knew that $15 is more than the digital wholesale price of an album. So, what we did in the app was, once the tracks would lock, and if you wanted to unlock them, you could go to our offer wall where the hero offer was Rhapsody. If you signed up for a free trial, we unlocked unlimited streaming in the app and sent lossless MP3 downloads of every track, so the fan owned them forever. And you could cancel the Rhapsody trial and never get charged and you still got to keep the music. Our artists like Lil Wayne were happy because he got $15 from every album sale instead of $10. Fans were happy because they got his new album for free. And Wayne was even happier because all those fans now were his and he could keep marketing to them with fan experiences, merchandise, and let them know when he was coming to their zip code.

Tapedeck wants to redefine the future of digital music. (Courtesy of Tapedeck)

You've shown how these models are successful, where fans clearly want to support artists and artists want something more equitable. So, in your opinion, why do apps like Spotify still have such a huge share of listenership?

Because it's so easy, there's zero friction. Everything is there. You hit play and, even if you haven't subscribed, you can play anything. But we're deliberately not trying to compete with them, at least in the early days. For the first one to three years, we plan to be an indie-based music discovery service. Bandcamp has already demonstrated that you can build a $25 million per year business as an indie music download store, and they're not even monetizing streaming. Through interviews and research, we've identified a cohort of users who I call above average music fans that are not casual listeners and they are not satisfied with Spotify because they recognize the musicians they love are struggling to make a living. But if they know that money is going directly to the artist, they're okay if there's an ad between them pushing play and the song coming up. They're okay if they have to scroll through an offer wall and find a game they already play to get more free plays so that's who we are marketing to. But I do eventually want to force Spotify to match us. I think that will be good for the music business overall.

Even if you're not competing with Spotify, there have been a lot of artists dropping off the platform, whether because of the revenue issues or because of the founders donating to causes that they don't align with. Will you try to go after those artists to give them a streaming home again?

Anyone who's made a public stink about hating Spotify, I am either in conversations with or trying to find an in to have a conversation with them.

The other benefit of Tapedeck is its function as a music discovery tool. How does your algorithm accomplish this?

We're constantly recommending things to you. So, if you browse a particular artist, that's a signal. If you've actually played that artist, that's a stronger signal. If you play that artist a lot, that's an even stronger signal. So, the more you use Tapedeck, the more personalized you will find the home page becoming to you. Coming from Rhapsody, I came from the editorial world. I've got human stuff in my DNA, so I don't think you can do this just with code. You need experts building the foundation that code works on. Search and discovery is hugely important to me, and not just because we have a limited catalog. Even at Rhapsody when we had everything, search and discovery was how we made people continue paying their subscription fee. Because a subscription service isn't worth it if it's not constantly turning you on to new things. When I look at other search algorithms, I hate them with a passion, particularly since I listen to so much left-of-the-dial stuff. I will type in the exact name of who I'm looking for, and it might be on the second page of results if that artist only has like 20,000 monthly listeners. They'll give me a whole bunch of stuff that's only tangentially related, and I can't stand that. I told you exactly what I was looking for, and you're not making it easy for me to get to it. We want to change that.

The name Tapedeck might imply an analog service to some. How did the name come to be?

When the team approached me with it, I didn't like it at first because it's nostalgic and we want to be about the future, not about the past. But they convinced me it was actually in line with our values, which are about ownership and control and a direct interaction or a more physical relationship with the music, to the extent that can be had in a virtual service. As they reminded me, when you make a mixtape, you hand it over to a friend, and that's the exact type of exchange we want here.

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