Meet the Experimental Musicians Who Built Their Own Streaming Service

Unsatisfied with the corporate streaming model, an idealistic group of avant-garde improvisers created a small-scale alternative—and want other artists to do the same.
artists building with the components of a streamer
Graphic by Drew Litowitz

Talk to enough musicians about the problems they see with corporate streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, and you’re bound to encounter a version of the following proposition, usually presented as a far-off hypothetical, if not an outright unattainable dream. What if we got together and built an alternative platform that prioritized the needs of independent musicians? What if we made the rules about who gets paid, and how? And what if we owned the company ourselves?

Catalytic Sound, a cooperative organization comprising 30 avant-garde instrumentalists and composers, is attempting to actualize this dream—and hoping to help other similarly minded musicians do the same for themselves. In January, the co-op’s partners launched Catalytic Soundstream, a small-scale streaming platform that charges listeners $10 per month for access to a rotating library of albums from the fringes of improvised music. The catalog is much more curated than the neverending buffets of the major platforms, with between 100 and 150 albums available at any given time and new ones swapped in and out every day. Most of these records feature one or more of the players who operate Catalytic and share equally in its revenue, an international and multi-generational roster of out-jazz and free improv luminaries that includes Joe McPhee, Tomeka Reid, Tashi Dorji, Ikue Mori, claire rousay, Chris Corsano, and Luke Stewart.

Within the bounds of experimental improvising, these musicians cover vast aesthetic territory, from McPhee’s strong roots in the jazz tradition to rousay’s use of field recordings and found speech. But according to Stewart, a D.C.-based organizer and bassist whose groups include Blacks’ Myths and Irreversible Entanglements, Catalytic Sound’s partners share an “underground aesthetic—one that has historically been ignored, but has also historically been fiercely independent, taking it all the way back to Sun Ra.”

To draw a comparison to video streaming, listening to music via Catalytic Soundstream feels more like browsing the Criterion Channel than Netflix. The records on offer, even at their most accessible, are well to the left of mainstream taste. (Someone wandered into the room as I was deep into Broken English, by the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet—a group that includes several Catalytic partners in its membership—and remarked, not inaccurately, that the music sounded like “screaming, but with instruments.”) You shouldn’t expect to find the album everyone else is talking about, or even to find any particular album at all. You’re better off picking something you don’t know and following the platform’s thoughtful curation, which generally includes a note from one of the partners, much like a staff pick write-up at a bookstore.

If your ears are open to this sort of music, and you’re willing to trust your guides, you are all but guaranteed to hear thrilling, challenging, and mind-expanding sounds that you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Though many of the releases are also available on other platforms, Catalytic Soundstream surrounds each album with far more context and less competition for your attention than traditional streaming platforms, allowing you to approach the music closely on its own terms. And as a condition of their partnership in the co-op, every musician is asked to make one record per year for exclusive distribution through Catalytic. As a result, a substantial part of the catalog—55 of the 135 albums listed, at the time of this writing—is not streamable anywhere else, including Bandcamp.

Bandcamp inspires both gratitude and wariness in Stewart, who considers it a valuable alternative to the big streaming services, but is reluctant to put his faith in any company with its own profit motive, even a well-intentioned one. The way he sees it, hierarchies of aesthetic value will arise whenever there’s pressure to meet the bottom line, and music like the Catalytic partners’ will always face the danger of being sidelined in favor of more conventionally marketable sounds. “Even if it is not that much money, it’s honest money,” Stewart says of the co-op. “Truly independent money.”

There are plenty of reasons to worry about the state of the recorded music industry in general, but Catalytic is also concerned with the precarity faced by experimental musicians in particular. “We’re on the margins,” says Ken Vandermark, a co-founder of Catalytic and a veteran reed player/composer in Chicago’s free jazz scene. “To generate income for these musicians, we really have to strategize. We have to do all kinds of things that are a little more tricky than more popular forms of music.”


It wouldn’t have happened without Nipsey Hussle. Catalytic Sound started in 2015 as an online record store for its partners’ catalogs and expanded to include streaming after Vandermark encountered a tweet from the late L.A. rapper in 2018. Hussle provided estimates for the sort of payouts a musician could expect for one million plays on several major streaming services. For Tidal, Hussle’s service of choice, the number was $12,500; for Spotify and Amazon Music, it was around $4,000. “The musicians I work with, we will never get a million streams,” says Vandermark. “And for $4,000, you can’t even get into a studio and make things. It was like, OK, just symbolically, I want to figure out how to do a streaming service that’s going to pay musicians fairly. And I don’t know the technological part at all.”

Work on Catalytic Soundstream began in late 2019 and took about a year to complete. Its final form reflects both the spirit of equity that Vandermark had in mind and the lack of high-tech sophistication that he saw as a challenge. Listeners subscribe to the service via Patreon and access it via their web browser, on a barebones but thoroughly functional website where albums are hosted on private SoundCloud embeds.

Monthly revenue from memberships is split into two chunks, with one-third going toward the expenses of the co-op and two-thirds going to the artists. Of that two-thirds portion, $450 goes to compensate whichever musician recorded that month’s exclusive album. The rest is divided among 29 of the 30 partner musicians, thanks to one partner who voluntarily foregoes their share. In one crucial difference from the corporate streaming model, each partner receives an equal portion of the monthly subscription revenue, regardless of how many streams their music racked up in a particular month. The model, for now, depends on some largesse from the labels that originally released the albums in Catalytic’s library, which have largely agreed to waive the money they’d receive under a traditional streaming deal.

Soundstream currently has 141 paying subscribers, some of whom pay extra for subscription tiers that include physical merchandise. As of February, these subscribers generated a net monthly revenue of $2,670 for the organization, with each partner’s share coming to $46. That sum is supplemented by sales revenue from Catalytic’s webstore; artists generally receive half—a significantly larger share than traditional retail offers—with the other half going back into the co-op.

Catalytic has grown gradually in membership and ambition since its early days, but sales of LPs, CDs, and digital downloads remain crucial to its model. Vandermark now refers to himself as “quasi-director,” a begrudging acknowledgement of his leadership role in an organization that aspires to anarchic egalitarianism, with each member given a voice in every institutional decision. He admits to an old-school personal preference for physical albums; even today, as one of the architects of a new streaming service, he doesn’t use streaming himself and seems vaguely puzzled that listeners of music like his might want it as an option. Catalytic’s streaming platform represents an effort to meet those listeners where they are, and to provide partner musicians with a source of income that, though humble, is reliable.

claire rousay, a composer and percussionist based in San Antonio who joined Catalytic in mid-2020, has received anywhere from the $46 minimum to several hundreds of dollars per month from the co-op, depending on sales of her albums. She makes her living entirely through music and art; with COVID-19 severely limiting performance income, membership in Catalytic has helped her stay afloat. “In the middle of the pandemic, it was kind of scary,” she says. “And I started working with the co-op, and I was like, ‘Oh shit! This is crazy.’ Every month, I get a deposit sent to me. ‘Here’s your money.’ That rules. Now I don’t have to worry about this $100 to $300 for my budget this month.”

Catalytic isn’t making any of its partners rich, but then again, neither is Spotify. (Even the $46 the musicians received at minimum last month adds up to a bigger yearly check than plenty of artists see from corporate streaming.) The big platforms distribute royalties amongst a near-infinite number of artists, some of whose pots are exponentially larger than others; comparatively, Catalytic can guarantee each artist an enormous fraction of its total revenue each month. It’s not hard to imagine how even relatively modest gains in its subscriber count—say, 1,000—could translate to a substantial income boost for each partner.

On its own, the collective could never compete with the scale of Spotify or Apple Music, and it isn’t meant to. In the interest of keeping the organization manageable and maintaining the size of each artist’s revenue share, the partners have capped their roster at 30 for now. (Their commitment to staying small doesn’t mean they intend to be miserly; last year, they donated $6,300 to various social justice organizations, a practice they plan to continue.) They envision a network of similar grassroots cooperatives, each independently supporting its own musicians and operating according to its own terms, while also sharing knowledge and working to achieve common aims. Collaboration among co-ops, they hope, will look something like the collaboration among partners in Catalytic itself.

“If we figure out how to do a streaming service, which we did, we can share that technology with another co-op, so they don’t have to figure all that crap out, and they can save a lot of time,” Vandermark says. “In Berlin, if they’ve got a co-op there, and they have their own resources, maybe more funding, maybe they can figure out better publishing, to do physical copies of books, and they give us that information. Suddenly you’re sharing all these resources, musician to musician.”

The partners are currently assembling a guidebook to creating a musicians’ co-op from the ground up, which they plan to publish and distribute for free in hopes of inspiring similar enterprises and bringing their large-scale cooperative vision to life. Their belief that such a vision is attainable and worth striving for may come back to the sort of music they play. At their best, players in avant-garde jazz and improv ensembles combine extraordinary freedom of individual expression with equally extraordinary devotion to listening and serving the needs of the whole. The co-op model thrives on a similar union of two putatively opposed ideals. Catalytic, Stewart says, is “effectively a big free improv ensemble in the way that it functions.”

Vandermark agrees. “You’re always working in groups where your creative attitude is essential to the success of the group, even if you’re not the leader,” he says. “In a collective like this, you’re shifting the platform, but people inherently understand that they’re not forced to fit into a certain mold to belong to the group. We want all these people to be exactly doing what they’re doing, and being heard.”