Effective date: 10 June 2026 Last updated: 10 June 2026
Simuze is created and operated by Atypisch.nl, a digital infrastructure studio based in the Netherlands.
Music platforms have a long history of taking too much from artists. Simuze is built on a different premise: a platform that only makes money when artists do, with everything visible.
This isn't a clever marketing line. The original Simuze, between 2005 and 2010, was a community-funded music network. It went offline when the third-party server sponsorship that kept it alive disappeared. The rebuilt Simuze is structured so that doesn't happen again: we own our infrastructure, our funding model is fees on sales, and the numbers are public.
How we make money
Simuze takes a transparent percentage of each sale. That's it.
| What's sold | Simuze's share | Artist / organiser's share | |-------------|----------------|----------------------------| | Music downloads | 10% of the sale price (ex. VAT) | the rest (ex. VAT and payment fees) | | Event tickets | 5% of the sale price (ex. VAT) | the rest (ex. VAT and payment fees) |
Payment processor fees (typically 1.5%–4% plus a small fixed fee per transaction) are passed through at cost. We don't mark them up.
That's the whole funding model. We don't sell ads. We don't sell your data. We don't have premium tiers that lock features behind a paywall. We don't take a cut of streaming.
A worked example
Say a fan buys an album for €10 in the Netherlands.
Fan pays: €10.00
├─ 21% VAT (digital): €1.74 → goes to NL Tax Authority
└─ Net price: €8.26
├─ Payment processor fee (~3%): €0.30 → goes to payment processor
├─ Simuze fee (10%): ~€0.83 → Simuze
└─ To artist / label: ~€7.13For tickets, the same shape applies with the ticket VAT rate (9% for many cultural events in NL, see your specific event) and the 5% ticket fee.
These numbers will appear on every transaction receipt.
What you get for the fee
The fee covers the actual costs and labour of running Simuze:
- Hosting, bandwidth, storage, backups, and infrastructure (which we own and control, not rent at the whim of a sponsor).
- Development and maintenance of the platform.
- Payment processing, accounting, VAT remittance.
- Customer support for fans and sellers.
- Trust & Safety: moderation, copyright handling, abuse response.
- Future features driven by the community.
When we earn less, we work on Simuze less. When the community grows, we can do more. That alignment is the point.
What we don't do
To be precise about what we don't take a cut of or take part in:
- Streaming: free, unmetered, no fee. Artists set whatever streaming policy they want for their own music; Simuze doesn't insert itself into that.
- Merch we don't sell: if you sell physical merch elsewhere and just link to it from Simuze, that's free. We don't track those links and don't take a cut.
- External revenue: Patreon, Bandcamp, your own site, ko-fi, mailing list signups — link to all of it freely. We're a node in your network, not your gatekeeper.
If you sell something through Simuze that we don't have an explicit fee for, we won't invent one — we'll ask first.
Subscriptions and "Simuze Plus"
There isn't one. We don't currently offer a paid subscription to fans or artists. If we ever do, it'll be additive (extra optional features) and never put existing functionality behind a paywall.
When we change our fees
We may adjust fees over time. If we do:
- We'll give at least 30 days' notice to all sellers.
- We'll publish the change and the reasoning.
- Fees will never be applied retroactively to sales already made.
Promotions and reduced-fee days
We may run reduced-fee or fee-free promotional periods — for example, a "Simuze Friday" where all artist sales are fee-free. These are always in addition to the standard arrangement, never instead of it.
Why this matters for the platform's survival
A music platform that depends on advertising depends on engagement, and engagement on a music site is not the same as music being good. It's the same metric a meme generator optimises for. We'd rather have fewer, more meaningful visits from people who love what's happening here.
A platform that depends on a single sponsor depends on that sponsor's mood. The original Simuze learned this in 2010.
A platform that takes a clear share of clear transactions has a clear future: as long as music is bought and shows are sold here, we keep going. That's the deal.
Questions
admin@simuze.com — happy to answer anything about how the money flows, what the fees cover, or anything else on this page.