QSync Ethical Music Foundation

Mission statement

QEMF is a non-profit foundation. It exists so that the people who make music keep what they earn from it, and keep control of what they made.

Recorded music is sold through systems that were not designed for the people who record it. Value accrues to whoever holds the catalogue, attention is allocated by ranking machinery the artist cannot see, and the master recording - the one asset an artist genuinely owns - is handed over as the price of being heard.

The Foundation exists to prove that none of that is necessary, by operating that way rather than by arguing that somebody else should. It owns and runs the QEMF Music Store: not a company that licenses it, not a shareholder who could sell it, but the Foundation itself, bound by the charter below.

Charter

These are constraints on the Foundation, not aspirations for it. A principle that cannot be breached is not a principle, and each of these can be.

1. QEMF owns and manages the QEMF Music Store

   The Store sells music, media and content to consumers, by download or as a physical product.

   The price is set by the Content Provider, not by QEMF. A registered Content Provider is the rights holder, and they set both the fee and the sales model they sell under: streaming, short-term rental, perpetual sale, or any combination of those.

   QEMF collects the money from consumers and pays it to the Content Provider, less card payment fees and approximately one percent to cover what it costs to run the Store - servers, infrastructure and support. That one percent is cost recovery, not profit. The Foundation takes no margin, and what it actually costs is published.

2. QEMF must never be sold

   The Foundation must never be sold to a private or public company. There is no acquisition, no exit, and nobody holding a stake that could be bought. What the Foundation owns, including the Music Store, is not for sale with it.

3. QEMF must remain non-profit

   The Foundation must remain non-profit. Money that reaches it goes back into running the store and serving the people who use it. There are no dividends and no owners to pay.

4. QEMF must be run by an elected board from the music industry

   The board is elected, and its members come from the music industry: a mix of professional musicians and audio engineers. The people governing the Foundation are the people whose work it exists to protect.

5. QEMF must give its content to competitors

   The Foundation must provide all of its content to any competing music store or streaming service that asks. An artist's reach must never depend on staying with us, and a catalogue held hostage is the practice this Foundation was formed to end. This one is deliberately costly: it is what makes the rest of the charter mean something.

The relationship with QSYNC

QSYNC builds the technology. It provides the platform, the infrastructure and the support that the Music Store runs on, at cost: QSYNC takes no profit from the store, and those costs are fully disclosed rather than asserted.

That arrangement is temporary by design. QSYNC will hand the Music Store over to the Foundation twelve months after the store opens. From that point the Foundation owns and runs it outright, under the charter above.