Minutes, not streams
Most platforms count a play the moment a track passes thirty seconds. A listener who skips at second thirty-one and a listener who stays for twelve minutes count the same. Music For Work does not count plays. It counts minutes.
If your ten-minute track is played end to end inside a session, that is ten minutes to your name. If a listener leaves at minute four, it is four. The average uninterrupted listen across sessions is 48 minutes, so the minutes add up in a way thirty-second plays never do.
How a session's pool is split
Every session, Deep Focus, Creative Flow, Calm Study and Late Shift, has its own pool. The pool for a period is divided between the artists whose tracks were in that session during that period, in proportion to the minutes each artist's tracks were played.
Two artists with the same number of minutes in the same session earn the same. An artist with tracks in two sessions takes a share of both pools. Nothing is weighted by follower counts, by who applied first or by how many tracks you have in. Minutes played are the only input.
What is decided by the curator, not by you
Placement is the curator's call. You can name the session you think fits in the application, and curators read it, but where your track lands and how often it is sequenced follows the shape of the session and the feedback from listeners, not your preference.
This is worth saying plainly. You cannot buy placement, and you cannot choose it. What you control is the material: how long it is, how well it holds, and how many sessions it could sit in.
Dollars, and what you see in your portal
Earnings are calculated in US dollars, whatever country you are in. For artists paid in a currency that moves, that is the point. Your minutes and earnings are reported to you on the schedule set in the artist agreement; your portal already holds your application, your channels and your share tools.
The payout method, the schedule and the rates are not on this page on purpose. They are set out in the written artist agreement you sign after approval and before anything is played, and they are the same for every artist.
What long listens change
On a platform built around thirty-second plays, the strategy is a hook in the first ten seconds and a track short enough to be replayed. Here the opposite is true. A track that holds for twenty minutes without a build earns for twenty minutes. A track that jolts the listener out of their work at minute three earns for three and does not get sequenced again.
The incentive and the craft point the same way: make music that disappears into a work block, and the minutes follow.
What you can do to earn more
Three things, all of them in your hands.
- Send longer tracks, or several shorter pieces in the same texture, so more of a block can be yours.
- Fit more than one session. A quiet piece that works in Deep Focus and Late Shift takes a share of two pools.
- Keep the texture even. Tracks that get skipped stop being sequenced; tracks that get finished get sequenced more.
- Tell your own audience. The portal's share tools give you a message and a link. Listeners you bring who stay for an hour are minutes on your name.
What this is not
It is not a stream count, it is not a fan subscription and it is not a licensing fee. Those may exist elsewhere, and you keep every right to your music, so nothing here stops you from earning from the same tracks on other platforms.
This is a share of a session's pool for the minutes your music was part of someone's working day.
By the Music For Work curators