Why we built this
In 2021 three of us were working in post-production and noticed something irritating: the reference mixes we spent weeks getting right were reaching listeners as 256 kbps AAC. All that work on room tone, on the decay of a cymbal, on the silence between phrases — compressed away for bandwidth savings that stopped mattering years ago.
Storage is cheap now. Home connections are fast. The technical reason for lossy streaming largely evaporated somewhere around 2018, but the industry kept the habit because nobody was complaining loudly enough.
So we built a service that does two things properly: deliver the master intact to whatever you're listening on, and put independent music at the centre rather than the margins. No proprietary codec, no "enhanced" processing, no loudness normalisation by default. FLAC in, FLAC out.
Independent by design
The decision to carry no major-label catalogue was deliberate, and it cost us a lot of potential subscribers. But it is the reason the rest of this works. Independent artists and labels can deliver their own masters at studio resolution without a distributor re-encoding them first. They can price and release on their own terms. And because there is no major catalogue competing for placement, our editorial team can actually surface records on merit.
Today the catalogue sits at roughly 1.4 million tracks from 60,000 artists across 3,400 independent labels — jazz, modern classical, ambient, electronic, folk, and a great deal that does not sit neatly in any of those. If you have spent years feeling like the interesting records were hard to find, this is the place we built for you.
How we pay artists
We use a user-centric royalty model rather than the pooled model most services run. Your subscription is divided among the artists you actually listened to that month, rather than pooled globally and distributed by market share. For independent artists with dedicated listeners this typically works out considerably better.
We publish an annual transparency report with aggregate payout figures, our revenue split, and average per-stream rates by tier. The 2024 report is available in the Resources section.
Where we are
Music Alligator is operated by Music Alligator Lda., registered in Lisbon, Portugal. Our engineering team works remotely across Europe, with a small studio in Tallinn where we do listening tests and encode verification.
Questions, licensing enquiries or press: hello@musicalligator.xyz