How stms works
stms is where music creators build a professional identity — through work, credits, and clear rights. A few things here work differently from what you are used to, on purpose. This page explains all of them.
Your profile is your work
There is no follower count here, and nothing is ranked by plays. Your profile is the work on it and the people you have made things with — that is the whole measure.
This is why you had to put something up before you could get in. An empty profile cannot be judged, cannot be found, and cannot be collaborated with. One piece of work is enough to start.
Your profile lives at a permanent address — /@yourhandle — which is what credits and links point at. That is why the handle cannot be changed later.
Rights: the four answers
Every piece of audio you upload carries one answer to the question “what am I allowed to do with this?” You pick it per upload, and you can change it later.
These are enforced, not suggested. A Listen Only file has no download path anywhere in stms — not a hidden button, not a guessable link. The rule is applied where the file is served, so there is nowhere for it to leak from.
The master you upload is stored privately and never replaced. What other people hear is a stream made from it. Private is separate from all of this — it is a visibility setting, not a rights preset, and it means only you can see the work at all.
Contact starts from a piece of work
There are no cold messages on stms. You cannot open someone’s inbox out of nowhere. Every conversation begins with a request about something specific.
There are three ways to start one, and they all produce the same thing:
The person receiving it can approve, decline, or ask for changes. Approving opens a conversation between you — and for a Request to Use asset, it also lets you download it. Declining closes that particular ask for 30 days.
Requests expire after 14 days if nobody answers. There is a daily limit on how many you can send, lower for brand-new accounts with nothing uploaded, because that shape is how spam arrives. Blocking someone is absolute and silent.
Credits need both people
When you release something, you create a release and name everyone who worked on it. Each of those is an invitation, not a statement.
A credit only becomes real when the person it names confirms it themselves. Until then it shows as pending confirmation and does not link the two of you. Nobody can confirm a credit on someone else’s behalf — not even the release owner.
This is the reason a credit here means something. Anywhere else, a credit is a claim one person typed. Here, both people agreed to it, and there is a timestamp saying when.
If someone declines, that answer stands — you cannot ask them again for the same role on the same release. Your own credit on your own release is confirmed straight away, since you are both sides of it.
Projects and splits
Once a conversation turns into actual work, you can make it a project: a small room with both of you in it, the assets involved, and a place to write down the splits you agreed.
Splits are recorded, never enforced. If a column does not add up to 100, stms will say so and save it anyway. A half-agreed split is still worth writing down, and the alternative is that it lives in a chat nobody can find later.
stms has no payments and touches no money. A split here is a record of what you said, for the day it matters.
What gets recorded
Every asset page has a provenance section. It lists what happened to that piece of work: when it was uploaded and the fingerprint of the exact file, that you attested it was human-made and yours, every change of rights, every request and every approval.
That log is append-only. Nothing in it can be edited or deleted afterwards — not by you, not by us. Corrections are made by adding a new entry, never by changing an old one.
One more rule worth knowing: AI-generated vocals and instrument performances are not allowed here. You confirm that at every upload, and that confirmation is part of the record.