Two committed advocates of independent artists, Sonicbids and Vocana are announcing a new collaboration, “Pay the Artists: A Vocana Live Series”, a series of six concerts that runs through April. This series harnesses live music’s discovery superpower and supports all the players that power the indie music community. The program will showcase independent artists at five independent New York venues, SugarMouse, SourMouse, Drom, Arlene’s Grocery, and Berlin, with a kickoff event at Arlene’s Grocery on January 21.

For Pay the Artists, Sonicbids will curate lineups that reflect the shared indie ethos of the two companies and the communities they support. Fans will have access to discounted ticket offers for these events when they download Vocana. Artists will receive a $200 guarantee bonus, as well as the full ticket price with the discount subsidized by Vocana. 

The two company’s missions shake hands perfectly. Both have a passionate commitment to artists who are forging their own paths creatively and professionally. SonicBids has opened up millions of live performance opportunities for musicians thanks to its marketplace, introducing artists to new fans. Vocana, currently in public beta with a launch slated for this year, was created to make music streaming fairer and more rewarding for indie artists, blending human curation, more data for artists, direct connections between artists and fans, and a better payout model. 

“Pay the Artists is designed to uplift the independent music community where it already exists, undergirding the ecosystem of artists, fans, and venues at every step. We are supporting musicians where they already play, at venues that support them, while delighting fans with great ticket prices,” notes Neil Sheehan, president of Vocana. “The series is an extension of what we already see happening on Vocana, as humans connect with humans to discover and boost independent music.”

“Live music is one of the best ways to hear something new, for artists to connect with fans, something Sonicbids has been facilitating for indie artists for decades. This collaboration with Vocana offers something to everyone involved, anyone who wants to keep music independent and vibrant in an era of slop and algorithms,” reflects Dan Melnick, owner and CEO of Sonicbids. “We’ve created some inspiring lineups we know music fans will love, at venues dedicated to supporting new music.”

Kickoff Event: Pay the Artists: A Vocana Live Series: The Blend #4

INDUSTRY MIXER & SHOW
In collaboration with Tealeaf Collective
Arlene’s Grocery (95 Stanton, NYC)
January 21, 2026; doors at 6:30, show at 7:30
Shannon Summers / Tiger Would / Lady Lychee

Tickets: Get discounted tickets at vocana.co/live-discount
21+ ONLY / 100% ID CHECK - NYC ID AND PHOTOS OF ID NOT ACCEPTED

About SonicBids

Established in 2001, Sonicbids pioneered online music representation and became the industry’s leading marketplace connecting artists with promoters, venues, and career-defining opportunities worldwide. With more than 500,000 artists on the platform, Sonicbids remains the go-to destination for musicians and talent seekers looking to book, discover, and collaborate.

Advance Music Technologies, LLC—one of the world’s leading live-music technology companies—acquired Sonicbids in 2024. We combine cutting-edge technology with deep industry experience to build the tools independent artists and venues need today, including solutions that haven’t existed before. Through ongoing partnerships, research, and continuous innovation, Advance is bringing the future of live music to life one show at a time.

About Vocana

Founded by music lovers and indie-music veterans, Vocana (vocana.co) is an indie-only streaming platform designed to strengthen the relationship between artists and fans. Built around user-centric payments, direct artist-fan connection, human-led discovery, and transparent, actionable artist-level data, Vocana enables fans to directly support the artists they listen to and enables artists to truly understand their audience. Vocana is currently in public beta.

Indie-friendly payouts combined with world-class tech to create a true home for the beating heart of the music business, independent and emerging artists.

Nashville, TN – September 30, 2025 – Vocana has joined forces with MassiveMusic (formerly 7digital, part of the Songtradr brand portfolio) to build a truly innovative music service devoted to indie music, user-centric payment, and more interaction and discovery. Providing invaluable back-end support, MassiveMusic powers Vocana’s independent artist-only catalog and, most importantly, its highly innovative payout model that directly connects how artists get paid to what fans listen to.

This partnership builds on the deals Vocana has inked with major names in indie music, including CD Baby and Distrokid. The platform is currently open in beta for both artists and fans, with new features and music rolling out regularly. Full public launch is scheduled for early 2026. 

MassiveMusic will allow Vocana to ingest new releases and rightsholder-approved, AI-enriched metadata, providing access to audio for 33.5mil tracks hosted on a worldwide network of servers that ensure minimal latency. MassiveMusic will also administer Vocana’s licenses and undertake reporting to all rightsholders, allowing payout according to Vocana’s groundbreaking user-centric model. This model, developed by the pioneering team that has shifted the industry conversation around payouts, better serves emerging and niche artists, the kind of creative force that thrives independently.

Though new, this model is slowly being embraced thanks to MassiveMusic and Vocana’s combined efforts. “It’s been exciting to educate our distributor partners about how reporting will work and the advantages our model will provide for their artists,” explains Neil Sheehan, President of Vocana. “MassiveMusic has been key in supporting this effort and communicating exactly what rightsholders should expect.”

Because Vocana only works with indie artists, it has been able to craft a far more just approach to payouts based not on pro rata, but on individual users’ listening habits. “A subscriber’s dollars are split between the artists that subscriber listened to,” notes Sheehan. 

“At MassiveMusic, we are proud to be able to power platforms like Vocana that are taking a truly fresh approach to supporting independent artists, human curators, and real fan interaction,” says Paul Langworthy, CRO of Songtradr and MassiveMusic. “Vocana’s user-centric model is a bold step forward for independent artists, and we’re proud to support it with our licensing, metadata, and delivery solutions. Together, we’re not just enabling a new platform; we’re helping build a fairer, more sustainable future for music.”

About Vocana

Founded by music lovers and indie music veterans, Vocana (vocana.co) is where independent music and community come together. The service is built around key tenets designed to make music thrive by fostering artist-fan connections, paying fairly, boosting human-led discovery, and ensuring fraud prevention. Now in public beta, artists and fans can join a music-loving movement, connect with music lovers who share their taste, discover new music, and stream on a platform built on user-centric payment. Thanks to this model, subscription dollars go directly to the artists that fans stream.

About MassiveMusic

MassiveMusic, part of the Songtradr brand portfolio, is the global music and sound partner for leading brands, agencies, & platforms. By blending creativity, data-driven insights, and market-leading technology, MassiveMusic delivers scalable music strategies, innovative technology services and award-winning creative solutions, driving measurable business value and shaping the future of sound.

Learn more at www.massivemusic.com.

Streaming music feels broken. What would make it better? Many music lovers already know the answer: Artists getting paid more. Fans finding more new music. More interaction and sharing. More humans, fewer algos.

These responses have shaped Vocana, a new music service combining truly user-centric payout models, fan contact info for artists, human curation, and a full range of social features meant to draw communities together around one important thing: music. Currently in public beta, Vocana is built for the thriving indie sector, the artists who are the engine of creative innovation in music. 

“Independent music is on the precipice of blowing up, and not just in streaming. The indie sector is growing faster than the overall music market, and by some estimates should reach more than $71B by 2030,” explains Vocana President Neil Sheehan. “It’s the real heartbeat of music in an era with fewer global superstars.”

To nurture this heartbeat, Vocana has created a service built around the goals and habits of musicmakers and fans, not the Magnificent 7, algorithms, or major labels. It wants to be a home for scattered online music communities that are underserved by current offerings, that may be splayed across platforms and social networks. To create this home, Vocana is working with some of the biggest names in independent music, inking recent deals with CD Baby and DistroKid, with more on the way.

The vision behind Vocana emerged from its founders' epiphany that the independent artists they loved seeing live were struggling to earn decent money from streaming, even when their music was great. Successful entrepreneurs new to music, co-founders Jim Knight and Dale Chorba resolved to end the on-stage tip jar and the streaming penny fraction and try to build something better for musicians. They wanted artists to get paid more and get heard more. They decided to build an app and a company. They founded Vocana.

Over the several years that followed, the Vocana team came up with interlocking solutions to streaming music’s biggest issues. They decided to go all in on indie. To diagnose the needs of independent artists, the founders turned to Sheehan, who had an extensive track record of successful independent music projects including a large concert promotion company and a label with hits that topped the Billboard indie charts. Sheehan knew what artists faced and insisted on several key areas of focus, if Vocana wanted to help music communities and set itself apart.

One of the biggest innovations was deploying a truly user-centric royalty payout model, one that benefits emerging and niche artists from the very first stream. Different from the pro-rata system at Spotify and from the artist-centric models deployed by SoundCloud and Deezer, it may sound nerdy, but it addresses one of music’s most daunting injustices and puts more revenue in more artists’ pockets. In simplest terms, Vocana’s model means that when a subscriber pays $8 for Vocana and listens to just four artists, those artists each get $2, instead of sharing a fraction of a penny with Drake and Bieber and millions of others paid out from one big pot of money. Along with giving emerging and indie artists a fairer share of the royalties, this model precludes fraud, as there’s no way to divert subscriber fees to artists these subscribers didn’t listen to. (A stream farmer would just get back what they put in.) 

“An artist or band trying to build their career, playing small shows and scraping together all their resources, has to scale massively before they can see much return from streaming using a pro-rata model. They won’t see anything from certain DSPs until they reach 1,000 streams,” explains Sheehan. “On Vocana, artists will see payment from every listener and from the first stream.”

Along with payout systems that better reward artists and better reflect fan listening habits, Vocana offers artists something else of value: data about who is listening, right down to the stream level. Artists can see the profiles of potential fans and message them, while fans can connect with other fans. Fans can opt in to share their emails with artists they like. This granular data and direct exchange are a far cry from the usage information shared by streaming platforms. 

For fans, Vocana creates a truly music-centered place to interact with others and discover their next favorite artist and fellow stans. With a full mix of social features, inspired by the spirit of MySpace, Vocana revolves around hubs, online gathering places for music fans of certain genres, scenes, or artists, as well as around human-curated playlists. Artists will soon be able to pitch these curators directly from within Vocana by pressing a button and filling out a simple form. Then the independent curators—non-commercial radio DJs, tastemakers, and music influencers—can reference these new releases and add them to their playlists.

With social sharing in app and a human editorial team, Vocana promises to supercharge discovery and surface tracks that would be buried on existing services. “Right now, only about four million tracks out of more than 200 million are served up algorithmically to listeners on services like Spotify,” notes Sheehan. “We want to surface music that isn’t from that thin layer of top tracks.”

By doing so, Vocana aims to help the artists and creatives most likely to bring innovative change to the art and business of music. “The way we see it, an independent artist is someone who takes control of their music and career. They embrace creative freedom and a direct connection with fans,” reflects Sheehan. “They are vital to the music ecosystem, providing authentic art that stands apart from market-driven outputs. With Vocana, we’re giving them a place where they can connect on their own terms and be rewarded fairly.”