Trust Trade: artists decide what Orphea takes

Every platform you've heard of takes a flat percentage from artist revenue, set unilaterally :

• Bandcamp : 10% on digital sales, 15% on physical. Bandcamp Friday is 0% — once a month, as a marketing event.
• Patreon : 8-12% depending on tier, locked at signup.
• Spotify : not a flat fee, but the streaming royalty pool model means a track keeping 100% of "your" royalty pays the artist around 0.003€/play. That's a 99.7% take rate dressed up in jargon.
• Ko-fi : 0%, but monetizes via a Pro subscription that locks features behind €6/mo.

What every model has in common : the artist doesn't get to choose. The platform decides what's "fair", and the only feedback loop is "leave for another platform that takes the same cut".

Open Orphea Studio → Revenue. There's a slider at the top. It controls the Orphea commission on every D2F transaction (tips, merch, exclusives — Stripe Connect handles the split natively).

• Min 10%. Floor. This is what keeps the platform alive.
• Default 50% (lambda). What most artists will land on. No bias either way.
• Max 80%. The "Patron" tier — for artists who want to actively fund the platform so newer artists get a shot.

Drag the slider. The numbers update live :

"On a €100 tip → you keep €70, Orphea keeps €30. Visibility multiplier 0.6×."

Confirm. Done. The setting is live within seconds. Stripe Connect picks up the new application_fee_amount on the very next payment.

Here's the part nobody else does. Your fee choice directly affects how visible you are in search and discovery.

The math is open and brutally simple :

visibility_weight = bps / 5000

10% → 0.2× (5× less surface)
30% → 0.6×
50% → 1.0× (lambda, baseline)
65% → 1.3×
80% → 1.6× (boost)

An artist at 10% who keeps 90% of their tip income gets 5× less search exposure than an artist at 50%. So absolute revenue tends to even out — keeping more per transaction means fewer transactions. The system self-regulates without us having to set a price floor or police the market.

This isn't payola. Payola is "pay extra to rank higher". This is "raise the platform's share, get more visibility". The mechanism is identical, but the framing flips : it's no longer a black market for placement, it's a transparent public contribution multiplier.

Three guardrails, on purpose :

1. 30-day cooldown on decreases. Drop your fee from 50% to 10% today, you can't drop again until June 4. Increases ignore the cooldown — patron actions are friction-free, anti-platform flips aren't. Server-side enforced (the DB trigger logs last_decrease_at, the API checks against it on every POST).
2. Public badge by default. Your fee is visible to anyone visiting your profile (you can hide the badge, but the visibility weight still applies — there's no way to take a 10% rate without your audience seeing the consequence in the algorithm).
3. Floor at 10%. No 0%, no negative, no "free month". You can't game the system by setting a value the system isn't designed to support.

Senior-dev note : this is enforced at three layers — Postgres CHECK constraint (1000 ≤ bps ≤ 8000), Zod validation in the API, and clamp() in the JS lib. Defense in depth, not a single line of trust.

Trust Trade is not a feature. It's a product-level statement that we'd rather let artists choose than impose a number. Concretely :

• If most artists drift to 10%, our revenue collapses but we stay alive. We've sized the fixed costs to break even at average 35% — we have ~25 points of margin to absorb a downward drift.
• If most artists drift to 65%+, we're flush, and the surplus funds Proof-of-Human verification, free DNA scans, and a higher base streaming rate (the 0.003€/play floor we already pay).
• If a single artist sets 10% and another sets 80%, both have agency. Neither is forced into the other's choice.

We're betting that giving artists this lever — visible, public, reversible — produces a better long-run distribution than the 10-15% one-size-fits-all that's calcified across every other platform. If we're wrong, the data will tell us. If we're right, this becomes one of the things only Orphea does.

Slider lives at orphea.app/artist/revenue. Default 50%. Move it where you want to be.