How Tahti works

For listeners

You don't need an account to listen. You never will — that's constitutional, not a growth-hack limit that gets tightened later.

1. Find a channel. Browse who's on air, tune into an artist's 24/7 channel (live blends straight into their archive when they're offline), or listen to Tahti Radio, a fair-rotation meta-stream of the whole community. No algorithm decides what you hear next — there is no "recommended for you" on Tahti, by design.
2. Hear it in full quality, free. Every listener gets FLAC 16/44 lossless audio on a member artist's channel, whether or not you or the artist pay for anything. Most platforms cap free listeners at 128 kbps or lower. Tahti doesn't gate audio quality at the listener tier — that's constitutional too.
3. Support an artist directly, if you want to. Fan subscriptions run €1–€100/month — the artist sets the price — straight from you to them. See the listener guide for how to subscribe, download, and chat.
4. Stay anonymous. Listening, downloading, and chatting all work without an account. Where an account exists (subscribing costs money, so billing needs one), IP hashes rotate daily — we cannot tell that the same listener came back yesterday. No tracking beyond what the product strictly needs to run, no cookies for analytics, no ads, ever.

For artists

The free tier is a complete product, not a trial. Everything below works whether or not you ever pay Tahti a cent.

1. Create your channel. Your own handle.tahti.live and /c/your-slug — set up in minutes from the dashboard. See the artist guide for the exact steps.
2. Broadcast, and keep an archive that never goes dark. Go live from OBS, Mixxx, Traktor, or straight from the browser. When you're offline, your channel plays your archive on a seamless loop — listeners never hit a dead page. Free tier broadcasts at MP3 192 kbps; members and their listeners get FLAC lossless.
3. Get paid two ways. Fan subscriptions keep 98% for you — the 2% operational fee covers Stripe and support, and any surplus it generates rolls into next year's grant pool rather than becoming Tahti's profit. Separately, 90% of the platform's entire annual operating surplus is distributed to artists as grants, split by engagement units — downloads and fan-sub euros, not passive plays — so an artist whose audience actually cares gets more than one who just racks up listener-hours.
4. Distribute everywhere else too. A smart link with DSP buttons for Spotify, Apple Music, Bandcamp, and more. One-form delivery to Spotify/Apple/Tidal via Revelator, plus direct Mixcloud publishing.
5. Get a real vote, not a feedback form. Every artist member votes at the AGM. The board is elected from the membership. The roadmap is public, and it changes based on what members actually approve — not founder discretion.

The money, transparently

This isn't a marketing summary of the numbers — it's the same rule the board operates under, published in the org's own constitution:

• Fan-subscriptions: 98% to the artist, 2% operational fee, 0% Tahti profit.
• Annual surplus: 90% distributed to artists as grants, 10% held in an operating reserve capped at 6 months of costs — anything above that cap goes back to artists too.
• No venture capital, no equity, no exit. Tahti ry is a Finnish nonprofit association (yhdistys) — it legally cannot become a for-profit company without dissolving the membership.
• Every euro in and out is published, monthly, in an append-only ledger — not a once-a-year PDF.

Read the full, current numbers on the transparency dashboard, or the exact grant formula and accounting methodology on the methodology page.