James Blake Partners With Subscription Service Vault to Address Streaming Royalty Issues for Artists

After a handful of social media rants on the fairness of royalty payment structuring in the music industry, James Blake has announced his participation in the launch of Vault, a direct artist-to-fan streaming platform focused on unreleased music.

“about a week ago I went viral with a post about the effects of streaming and TikTok on artists’ ability to support themselves,” said Blake in a post on X (formerly Twitter), announcing his new participation with Vault to provide artists with better streaming rates. Vault, whose motto is “What if making music was enough?,” approached Blake after his initial tweets went viral, and he describes their partnership as an “experiment” wherein he will charge listeners $5 per month for access to unreleased material.

“It’s music direct from me to you, where no one can gatekeep what I release to you, or delay my releases,” he said. “And it’s got a chat section for everyone to discuss the music.”

In the video, he begins by laying out just how little artists make from streaming royalties. “I wanted to give you some figures. This is how much artists make out of streaming: Between $0.003 and $0.005 per stream depending on that platform,” he said, “which is one million plays equals $3,000. If you’re signed to a label, then imagine that numbers cut at least 50 percent. And after management cut, which is between 15 to 20 percent, and taxes and recording overheads, it’s just not sustainable for an artist to focus just on their art.”

He continued by explaining that only 19 percent of artists on Spotify have more than a thousand listeners, and referenced the fact that TikTok pays so little that Universal Music Group removed its catalog from the platform. “I wanted to find a way for musicians to make money directly from the music they make, not least to be able to reinvest in the very expensive process of renting studios, hiring musicians, etc. Music is not cheap to make and I wanted to help incentivize musicians to actually spend more time making music. Also, I’ve spoken to a lot of artists that feel frustrated that so much great music goes unreleased because it doesn’t meet certain requirements or trends.”