Low cost
the feeLegacy payment services are another form of middle man that diminishes the ultimate income for artists.
Card processor 2.9% + 30¢ vs Station <$0.01
Revenue split
Sovereign payments, minimally extractive
Every design decision for Station aims to maximize control for the artist and minimize the extraction from them. No promises, only guarantees. Yesterday's payment rails couldn't provide this guarantee so we're using tomorrow's payment technologies.
Blockchain powered
Built on the newest payment technology
Smart contract enabled blockchains are the only payment technology that can provide the guarantees we're aiming for.
Programmable
the rulesArtist accounts carry special guarantees that can't get changed later. Smart contract accounts make the mission of minimally extractive a reality.
Sovereign
the controlSmart contracts are not owned or managed by Station, they belong to the artists and live on a distributed system not owned by Station.
The mechanism
Where the money actually goes
Every Fan Club and Storefront contract you deploy has a payment splitter built into it.
When a fan mints a FanPin or buys a track, the payment lands in your contract and is divided on the spot — your share, and Station's share, according to the split written into that specific contract. Your share sits there until you withdraw it.
There's no invoice, no billing cycle, and no moment where Station holds your money and passes some of it back. The division happens at payment time, inside a contract you own, on a public ledger anyone can read. The splitter itself is OpenZeppelin's PaymentSplitter — audited, boring, and not something we invented.
The guarantee
Your rate is locked when you deploy
The split is written into your contract at deploy time. Station can change the rate it offers new contracts. It cannot reach into a contract you've already deployed and take a larger share.
That's a small sentence with a lot behind it, and it's easiest to see next to how the rest of the industry works. A streaming platform sets its terms in an agreement, and reserves the right to change that agreement. The rate an artist starts at is a rate the platform can revisit whenever its business needs it to. There's no recourse, because there's nothing to enforce — the terms live on the platform's side of the relationship, and so does the ability to rewrite them.
Station isn't a platform in that sense. There's no agreement between us to revise, because your split was never an agreement in the first place. It's a deployed artifact — a number sitting in a contract you control. Our future intentions, funding pressures and changes of heart are all irrelevant to it.
Today
0% to Station. 100% to you.
This isn't a promotional rate or a free trial that converts later. There's no introductory period and no expiry date. A contract deployed at 0% | 100% stays at 0% | 100% for as long as it exists. If you deploy in this round and Station's split is 5% | 95% in three years, yours is still 0% | 100%.
There's no schedule for rate changes and we're not going to pretend we have one. What we can tell you is the shape of it: the first increase will be 1% | 99%, and increases after that will follow the same pattern — small, incremental, and applied only to contracts deployed after the change.
Early adopters
You take the risk, you keep the better rate
This falls out of the design rather than being bolted on, and it's the fairest version of early access we could come up with.
Deploying on Station today means betting on young software, a small network, and a project still working out its own economics. That's a real risk, and it isn't one later artists will take — by the time they arrive the thing will be proven, the network will be bigger, and the ground will be more solid. They'll pay a slightly higher rate for that certainty.
The rule is the same for everyone: whatever the split is on the day you deploy is the split you keep, permanently. Artists joining at 1% | 99% hold 1% | 99% even after the rate has moved past them, exactly as you hold 0% | 100%. Nobody's rate follows the network up.
Sovereignty
A robust hybrid system
Station was built so that artists don't need to depend on Station being a successful business in order to keep running their own business. Station enables artists to 'DIY together' and compete against large centralized platforms.
- Self-hosted infrastructure
- You choose what server provider you want to use and what location. You can even run on your own server if you have the bandwidth and know-how. No applications, registrations, etc.
- Peer-to-peer network
- Every Station instance is a participant in the network, so artists stay discoverable through each other instead of through a company running a directory.
- Public payments
- Payments settle on a decentralized network secured by the value held on it, not by any one company. Choose between native crypto currency and stablecoins, or both.
For the curious
A note on upgradeability
If "beacon proxy" means nothing to you, skip this — nothing in it affects your split.
Your contracts are deployed as beacon proxies: your proxy holds your state, and its logic comes from an implementation contract named by a beacon. During launch Station owns that beacon, so implementation bugs found early can be patched for contracts that are already deployed, rather than leaving artists stranded on broken code. It's a transitional window, not a permanent feature of the protocol.
Once the contracts have proven themselves, beacon ownership will be transferred to the zero address. At that point nobody owns it and nobody can upgrade any of these contracts again — not Station, and not whoever might come after Station.
Renouncing the beacon is a public transaction, so you don't have to take our word for when it lands. You can check the beacon's owner yourself on Blockscout.
Plenty of this is unsettled. Join the Telegram and argue with the economics — the people building Station are in there.