• How does selling music work?
• Do you require any form of exclusivity or right transfer?
• How do you promote our music?
• Who has copyright on the music that is sold?
• On what format is the music distributed? (copy-protection / DRM?)
• Can I send a CD to Anytist?
• Can I change/replace an uploaded song?
• What legal agreements regulate the use of the Anytist website and services?
• Is trading music this way legal?
• How about tax laws, VAT, etc?
• Why do you ask Swedish artists for their personal number?
• Who makes money on this?

Just go to the For Artist website section, click 'Register as New Artist', and fill out the form.

We do not charge Artists anything for registering and uploading songs to the website. Neither do we ask Artists to transfer copyright to us. There are no other "additional hidden costs" that get passed onto artists (e.g. for our marketing, or if we mention an Artist in 'News & Promotions'). We credit the Artists with €0.2 for each sold song.

For more information on how income is divided, etc. Please see the answer to 'Who makes money on this?'.

We do not ask for exclusivity. Artists do not sign over any other rights to us than necessary for us to be able to sell their songs via the website. Artists are free to sell the same tracks elsewhere and/or give them away for free. Furthermore, if an Artist at a later time need to give someone else exclusivity, they are free at any time to remove their songs from the website to cancel our rights to sell them. In short: We have no intentions to restrict artists rights to their own music.

For precise details, refer to our terms of service text for Artists.

The Anytist website itself will be promoted by us via various channels. We are still in an early stage of our marketing strategy, but our aim is to reach out to a large worldwide audience. You and other artists at Anytist all equally benefit from this exposure.

However, the marketing we do will generally not single out and promote music by specific artists. We encourage artists to do such promotion themselves. For example, you can link directly to your list of songs at Anytist like this:
    http://www.anytist.com/artists/<number>/
where <number> is your artist number (you can find this in the Artist user interface, or by clicking on your artist name in the Discover music section of the website).

Please feel free to use the Anytist web resources we have created for such links.

The Artists themselves retain copyright of the music being sold on this website. We do not ask for any kind of copyright transfer agreement or similar (which is common when artists sign up for record deals). All we ask for is the right to duplicate and distribute individual copies of the songs, until the artist retracts that right. (And if that happens the song will no longer be distributed by us, but listeners who downloaded the song keeps their rights to it).

A listener that 'buys a song' does that on similar terms as when buying e.g. a book. The rights for this are mostly regulated by normal copyright law. Typically when something is bought under copyright, you get the rights to use it yourself, but not to freely copy and re-distribute it; barring some exceptions referred to as "fair use".

We support listeners in exercising their "fair use" rights. We do not use any technical means or access controls to prevent duplication, but rather distribute the music as regular mp3-files. We just trust the majority of our listeners to be fair and do their best to support the artists of the music they listen to.

We distribute regular .mp3-files. We do not employ any kind of "digital rights management" (DRM) for copy- or distribution-protection. Fundamentally, we do not believe in any software or hardware system that limits a listener's capability to exercise so called "fair use" rights of copyrighted material. Rather, given our low price model, and the fact that most money goes directly back to the artists, we trust that most users will want to do the right thing and support the artists.

Yes, you can; but it is preferred that you upload them through our artist user interface.

To send us a CD, just mail it to our regular postal address found in our contact information. Be prepared that it may take up to a month for us to convert it for you and append the songs to your account.

If you instead convert the songs to mp3 files and upload them yourself via our artist user interface, the change is immediate.

There is no easy way of changing an uploaded song. The system with statistics like ratings and downloads could easily become misleading if this was possible.

The only way to 'replace' uploaded songs in the artist interface is to delete the old version, and then upload the updated song file as if it were a new song. Please note: the download count and rating of the old version will then be lost.

Alternatively, if you want to upload a remix that is different enough, you can also just let both versions be available at the same time. Simply name the remix a bit differently -- e.g. "Song name (dance remix)".

As a third alternative, if you really only have minor changes and it is still the same song (like a recording of improved quality), email us and ask for assistance. See Anytist contact info.

For just casual browsing without the use of any specific service, we rely on the following disclaimer:
"Anytist acts as a service provider for music distribution and does not accept liability for user contributed material (e.g. songs and comments). Activities at the Anytist website are governed by our terms of service under Swedish law. (More info...) "

To use the public forums at the 'Anytist Community' section of our website you have to agree to
    The Anytist Community Terms of Service.

To buy an Anytist code for purchasing music you have to agree to
    The Anytist Discover Music Terms of Service.

To be allowed to sell your music through our website you have to agree to
    The Anytist Artists Terms of Service.

These agreements and your activites at the Anytist website are goverened by Swedish law.

^^ back to top.

Yes, it is. We act as a distributor of music from people that voluntarily sign on. We do not knowingly sell and/or distribute any "illegal" music.

Naturally, there may appear situations where an Artist makes available a song that someone else claims copyright to. In that case, promptly inform us about the situation using the abuse links on the website. If we find that there indeed are trouble with a song we will block it from further distribution. Depending on the situation, the Artist or the complainant may feel that the situation requires legal action towards the opposite part. However, as far as possible, Anytist will stay out of such conflicts.

There is, of course, a minefield of different tax laws regulating this kind of world-wide trade. However, we try our best to be very careful to adhere to all these laws. As long as you only download songs, these laws should pose no problem for you; unless you are in a country imposing very weird import laws requiring you, as a buyer, to toll 'services'. (This should not be the case in Scandinavia, throughout the EU region, or in USA.)

However, if you are an Artist selling music, you will have to look up the laws governing this kind of activity. In Sweden there is the possibility, as long as the income is rather low and not your primary way of living, to simply add a T2 appendix to your income declaration and declare your music activities as an 'income generating Hobby'. However, we are not sure what similar laws exist outside Sweden. Artists making money have to investigate this themselves.

We are required by Swedish law to send a tax declaration notifications to the Swedish tax ministary when we pay out more than 100 SEK to a Swedish citizen during the year.

As long as you only request payouts that during the year sums up to less than 100 SEK, you are free to not give us your personal number. However, should you request a payout of your earnings such that the total sum of payouts during that year becomes 100 SEK or more, we are forced to withhold your payout until you fill in the personal number field in the artist info section. (Should this happen, we will of course inform you.)

For some more information about specific Swedish tax rules, please see the answer to 'How about tax laws, VAT, etc?'.

^^ back to top.

To end users the price for a song is typically somewhere between €0.3 to just below €0.4, including VAT and transaction fees.

The majority of this money, and thus the largest cut, always goes back to the Artists themselves. Each time a song is bought, €0.2 is credited the Artist of that song. The fact that the majority of the total amount of money a listener spends goes to the Artists is in significant contrast to e.g. CDs, where typically the Artists' cut is but a tiny fraction of the total price.

The second largest part is the Swedish VAT (25%) that we have to add to all sales within the EU tax region. This thus comes to about €0.08. As you know, this pays for things like hospitals, schools, elders, and day care in Sweden. (Well, that, and the ineffective system of bureaucracy ...).

Depending on what choice of code you buy (i.e. how many songs), a part varying between €0.08 and €0.02 goes to our payment service, Paypal (presumably a rather large part of this is passed on to the credit card companies and/or your bank).

What is left, roughly €0.05 / song (or about one forth of the cut that goes to the artists), goes to the maintenance of this website, payment for the Internet bandwidth for the download of songs and demos, marketing, and further development of our service. Should there be anything left after this (we have not yet turned into profit), this will supposedly be distributed as a sort of 'salary' to us who work with the website.