Vocana – A New Steaming Service Challenging Spotify

Vocana is a new streaming service with the stated goal of putting artists first. We spoke with President Neil Sheehan to find out how the venture plans to beat Spotify.

Taking on Spotify is no easy task. That’s what new music streaming service Vocana is aiming to do. Aside from Spotify, there’s also Apple, Tidal, Amazon, and all the other established players to contend with. Vocana plans to do things differently, however, with a user-centric payment model that sends your subscription money to the artists that you listen to, and royalty rates much higher than the industry standard.

We spoke with Neil Sheehan, the President of Vocana, to find out how the upstart company plans to compete in a very crowded marketplace.

Attack: How does your royalty payment system work?

NS: It’s one of the four pillars (that we’re founded on). The first one was, How do we pay independent artists more fairly? The large DSPs use pro rata. Your $10 subscription fee goes in this large pot and it gets broken down by market share. It doesn't go by who you listen to. Even if you and I are listening to, say, Morrissey, Taylor Swift is going to get the largest pot of this. 

The proof will be in the pudding when bands are showing checks that they're making more (with Vocana) than they would be pro rata. Just look at the stats. There are between eight to 12 million artists on Spotify and 99.8% make less than $10,000. There's a huge swath of artists there that want to get paid more.

How will you still make money?

We are like any other streaming platform. We have to pay out 30 percent of subscription fees to MLCs, or mechanical royalties, and then to PROs (Performing Rights Organizations). Then we take a small margin of about 20-plus percent, and the rest goes back to the artist.

Why have you chosen to exclude major labels? 

Well, if you look at the history of how pro rata started, it was because Napster came out and people were pilfering stuff. And then Spotify … went out and did deals with the major labels, or at least the larger major labels at the time. Part of that was getting advances and getting shares, but also cutting them good deals based on market share versus being allocated towards artists. 

I'm not in the boardroom of Spotify or Tidal. Would they want to try a user-centric system? Do they think it works? I've seen papers that people have put out and said it doesn't work for major label artists. But I think they have an anathema towards it right now because their partners don't want it. For us, our ethos, our North Star, has always been to assist independent artists. Major label artists already get enough help.

[quote align=right text="(We’re) definitely not competing, just giving artists a better platform to get discovered first, and maybe get paid as well."]

I see that you’re also allowing for merch sales.

We have a third-party API (Application Programming Interface) with Printful. Bands can create their own web store within our app. Every fan has a profile, every band has a profile, and there’s a streaming player on it. What an artist can do is create a merch profile within their profile and send their fans to it. Printful does all of the design for them, all the shipping for them. The band doesn't have to pay anything in advance. Essentially, it's print on demand. The artist doesn't have to do anything but accept a royalty check from all of the merch. 

It probably won't be part of the first version because we're rolling out other features first. Plus, we want to make sure that we have enough artists on there that want to open merch stores.

How will the social aspect work?

Our second pillar was that music has become fairly boring. You turn on Spotify or Deezer or whatever, and then you go do 10 other things, or an artist has a link tree that sends you out to different places.

You probably remember MySpace. It was a very simple platform, and bands almost used it as a website, plus their way to talk to fans and get fandom. Ours is very similar. You have a profile page. Fans can comment on there. They can DM them as long as both parties are following each other. They can have private hubs within their profile. 

The other thing that we brought on socially was short-form video. We have our own, which we call "Moments". A band can post a Moment or a fan can post a Moment, and it's very similar to any other short-form video (like TikTok).

How can artists upload to you? Is it through a digital distributor like DistroKid?

We are in the midst of doing all our licensing deals. We have CD Baby's content, DistroKid's content. We just did a deal with Symphonic. We have Downtown Artist & Label Services, Fuga, UnitedMasters. I think we have about 40 million tracks right now and two million artists.

I think people will give it a shot just because they've heard that if they do do some of these things on other DSPs, they're not going to get paid anyway. It doesn't hurt them to have their music all over the place.

I also make the comment to folks that when they say, well, how are you going to compete with Spotify and Deezer? We are essentially filling that niche on the streaming side. It’s not like we're licensing different content, we're just going to be propagated much higher and focus on those players who may not get a royalty or never be pushed into an algorithm to get found.

(We’re) definitely not competing, just giving artists a better platform to get discovered first, and maybe get paid as well.

Will people really want to take on another subscription?

It's a good question. I don't think people have a disregard for paying for multiple subscriptions. We all do it with Netflix, HBO Prime, and all this other stuff. I think it's more about competition for eyeballs. You can only have so many subscriptions, and how much time are you spending on each subscription? I think that's our biggest hurdle.

I don't think that's a hard sell because there's a niche audience out there that would do that, that believes in the art and believes in these bands. But how do you then get them to stay on your platform longer than another platform, because there's only 24 hours in a day, and so many apps that they're going to open up?

What’s your stance on AI-generated music?

It's not that we're against AI. I think there are two forms of AI that can happen. You could have a bunch of AI on our platform. It actually helps us where streaming fraud has become such an issue with an AI song and then bots that just run, run, run and eat up the market share. Well, user-centric stops that in a heartbeat. If we have AI songs on there and you have a bot, it can only extract the $10 subscription fee no matter how many times it plays it. It doesn't really hurt any other artists. Now, I will say that's not what we want to do. If we have an AI track, we're going to have a check mark by it, so at least you can tell it's AI. 

The secondary approach is we're going to propagate and put at the top bands that are live. And how do you do that? Well, you use third party partnerships, whether it's JamBase or Bandsintown or some of these other ones where you can go and see which bands are actually live bands that are out performing. If those bands are the ones that should be getting paid the most because they actually are real and they're out, that's who we're going to push to the top of the funnel, rather than an AI track that comes in that we potentially may not care about.

Again, the ethos is we're trying to protect artists who are going out, doing live shows, have real music, and get them paid.

You’re going to have human-created playlists?

That was one of our pillars. When you go to Spotify or Deezer or Tidal—again, I'm not trying to throw them under the bus—there are a lot of algorithms going on. We always thought about how, when you went to an old record store, there was a manager's board. We thought, why couldn't you do that in a streaming platform where you editorialize some of this stuff?

That's how we're doing it. We have a couple of influencers on there already. There are a few of them that we're already working with, and those will just get bigger and bigger as we go towards launch. 

Do you foresee Vocana being available in DJ applications like Serato and rekordbox?

Absolutely. One of our owners owns a club with DJs in Nashville. It's called Night We Met. And one of our product people is very big into that as well. Those are partnerships that I know they're going to be working on in the future. 

It's one of those niche communities that don't get a lot of recognition, that I think we need to champion outside of other ones that always get in the way.

How can we make listening to music exciting and fulfilling again?

Music creates emotion and memories. I can be somewhere and listen to a song, and it'll take me right back to prom or being with my friends somewhere. Music is better when it's together. There are not a lot of DSPs right now that, when you're listening, you feel together with another person and create a moment or a memory. This is what happened with MySpace. These guys created their own tribes. They had tribes of fans that all listened together and went to the same shows. You knew who they were. That's the one piece that's missing. You have to build a community around it.

I'm hoping that our social side will be a harbinger of that. We also have live streaming, so you could listen to it together, where it's actually creating, like I said before, a moment, an emotion. You’re actually listening with three or four other people at the same time.

What’s your fourth pillar?

The one pillar we didn't (cover) is that we are giving true data back to the artists. We will give emails back for every stream as long as that person opts into that. Every single stream, you can at least go to that person's profile page, add them, DM them, say thanks for listening to me. You're building this database that no artists get today. 

If I'm an artist and every day I come in, and I see 10 new emails or 10 new profiles of people I've streamed, why would I not come back? I'm getting fed these people that I didn't know before.

People have called me an idiot for trying it, but the artists never call me an idiot. They're like, holy shit, I actually know who listened to my song other than my grandmother.

Vocana will be launching in early 2026. Vocana Free will let you access the social and community features at no cost, while Vocana Plus (price to be announced) will unlock streaming, offline listening, and playlists for a monthly fee. Find out more at Vocana’s website.