This past June, Christian Phyfier and his All Star team of developers launched a new streaming company onto the App Store. From recording studios, to marketing and prepaid legal services, Scrybe Streaming is one of many music focused companies Christian has developed over the last decade built to assist artists in their growth, development and freedom.
We had a moment to sit with Christian and get insight into what the vision and overall goal of Scrybe is.
Why Scrybe and why now?
I’ve been building the business model for Scrybe for 4 years. Thinking of the perfect solution to the issues that the music industry has been facing since the era of CDs left. The largest issue on the creative side of the music industry is that independent artists & labels have lost the ability to place value on the content they create. On streaming apps, an artist’s music is licensed and they are told how much they get paid per stream. On youtube an artist’s videos are licensed and the artist is told how much they get paid per view. There’s no way of understanding how, or why it’s simply told to them and the artist has no choice but to accept it, or never be heard.
Scrybe is freedom. Back in the day an artist could make an album and charge $10 and sell it out of their trunk and survive. A label could let the artist keep their performance and merchandise revenue because the records could sell enough where things could be a little more “fair.” Nowadays artists are slaves to touring and shows. Slaves to other forms of revenue or needing a big engine to help them pop through the surface to generate enough revenue monthly to provide for their lifestyle and simply survive. That is what I’ve found, a lot of artists, like most people, simply would like to survive by doing what they enjoy. Fame is cool, but if they can pay their bills first, then they can focus on the fame after.
How is Scrybe different?
Scrybe was designed with the artist in mind from the moment it was conceived. Unlike most companies that are thinking about their bottom line and increasing the experience for the listeners and fans, who pay the subscription rates, we wanted to increase the functionality for the artist.
First, artist’s control how much their music is worth to the audience. That’s the number one thing. Take Drake as an example, if he were to convert his 50 million Spotify monthly listeners, to paying .10 cents a month on Scrybe, he would make 5 million dollars a month. That’s nearly the same pay that other platforms pay for 1.5 billion streams, and to earn that again, artists would need to raise another 1.5 billion streams. Scrybe is recurring regardless of streams.
Second, artists will be able to receive their payouts monthly. Artists need their revenue to survive, pay their bills etc. Waiting for 3 months is not the business.
While there are plenty of other benefits, the last one I’ll mention is that we allow direct to platform distribution. Artists can upload their music directly to Scrybe. I owned a distribution service for the last two years, and realized there are so many hidden issues within distribution that artists don’t know about, and so we want to be clear and direct with earnings.
You mentioned how all of this works for the artist but what about the listener, are things pretty much the same as other streaming companies?
No, definitely not. With fans we have helped them save money on their music streaming. Other streaming companies charge one flat rate for all the music on their platform. Music that most will never hear.
With Scrybe, fans only pay for the artists or podcasts they want to hear. For as little as $1 someone can have more than 1000 songs. Back to my example, if you’re a Drake fan and he places his entire catalogue for .10 cents a month, then you just gained 100 plus songs. If you’re not a drake fan and you only want to subscribe to 1 song at .01 cent a month then so be it. If that song gets old, unsubscribe. It’s that simple. Similar to audible and listening to books instead of purchasing every book you need.
Lastly, we have focused heavily on the users experience, we promise commercial free streaming for all users. Even the free users simply browse the free music that artists release. The only promotion a user may experience are from songs that we feel the user may enjoy.
Where do you see Scrybe within the next few years?
I see Scrybe expanding big time. I can’t say much because it’s being built as we speak but it will be a leader in the industry, hell It already supports podcasts. But I see us making things back into an open market, where creators are free again. I’d love to continue to find ways to allow creators to invest in their financial futures and the entire music industry as a whole.
Scrybe for IOS is officially in the App Store for listeners, fans and artists to download at the link below, and podcasts and musicians are all capable of uploading their content via the website ScrybeStreaming.com.
