A first-person YouTube testimony about using the payments platform STEM (discovered in 2016) to pay music contributors directly. The speaker reports concrete savings (~5% on business management fees), reduced legal risk when songs become successful, and improved transparency via clear splits, payment schedules, and a portal.
2016
About 5%
Uh, 2016, I figured out a tool called STEM that created an opportunity so that I could pay everybody directly. That alone saved me 5% on business management fees, and it's probably saved me a whole bunch of other money that I didn't even really think about at the time. Definitely saved me in getting sued because people like, yo, this song blew up and we ain't been paid. So it created a thing where everybody was on a equal playing field. And what infrastructure really does is that it creates normality. And normality basically means that everybody know when they get paid, everybody know they splits are. Everything is transparent. You can log into a portal to be able to see what is happening with the different things. So, yeah.
