Learn · Selling
How do you sell music for bitcoin?
The short version: you need a Lightning wallet, a place to put the music, and a checkout that unlocks delivery when payment settles. Settlement takes seconds and can go straight to a wallet you control. Here's how a sale actually works, and an honest look at the platforms doing this today.
A buyer clicks buy. A Lightning invoice is created for the price. The buyer pays it from any Lightning wallet, and the payment routes across the network and settles in seconds. Settlement is verified cryptographically, and the download unlocks. No card networks, no chargebacks, no payout batch at the end of the month.
The question that separates platforms is whose wallet mints the invoice. If it's the platform's wallet, the money crosses the platform's books and a cut comes out on the way past. On Lightning FM the invoice comes from the artist's own wallet. The sats settle from the buyer to the artist, and our cut is 0% because there is no moment when the money is ours to take a cut of.
Fountain is a podcasts-and-music app where fans support artists directly: Lightning payments at a 2% fee, or card payments via Stripe at 5% plus Stripe's fees.[1] Zap-style tips and streaming sats included.
Wavlake is streaming with a built-in wallet: fans send bitcoin directly, and artists keep 90% under its published splits.[2]
Lightning FM is free streaming plus purchases where the invoice is minted by your own wallet, so 100% of the sale price settles to you, structurally. We charge flat convenience pricing for hosting and delivery, never a percentage. See what platforms take for the full fee picture, cited.
For contrast: every fiat platform starts from a card-processing floor of roughly 2.9% + 30¢ per transaction before its own cut.[3] Lightning removes that floor for everyone above.
1 A Lightning address. From a hosted wallet or your own node. On Lightning FM it must support payment verification (LUD-21) so buyers' downloads unlock. We check when you save it, and refuse listings for addresses that can't verify, so failures happen before any money moves.
2 Your music, hosted. We host files on the free tier with storage quotas; artists who want full sovereignty can run their own node and serve their own files. The checkout works the same either way.
3 Nothing else. No company, no payment processor account, no minimum catalog size.
Do listeners need bitcoin to stream my music?
On Lightning FM, no. Streaming is free for everyone, with no account. Bitcoin only enters when someone buys: a download, an album. That's deliberate: free listening is the top of the funnel, and the purchase is where 100% settles to your wallet.
Do I need to run my own Lightning node?
No. You need a Lightning address whose wallet supports payment verification (LUD-21). Hosted wallets can do this, and Lightning FM checks yours when you save it, before anything goes on sale. Running your own node is the fully sovereign option and works too; it's just not the price of entry.
How fast do I actually get paid?
Lightning settlement is near-instant: the buyer pays your invoice, the sats land in your wallet, and delivery unlocks. There's no payout schedule, no minimum balance, and no platform account the money sits in first. On Lightning FM the money was never anywhere but your wallet.
What about fans who only have a card?
Some platforms bridge cards. Fountain, for example, offers Stripe card payments at a 5% fee plus Stripe's own fees, alongside 2% Lightning payments. Lightning FM is Lightning-only by design: card rails would put us back in the money flow, and keeping us out of it is the whole point.
Facts change. Every claim above links to its source as of the date shown. Check the source, and if we're out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.