🤖📼
Robot Royalties
AI agents pay real money to license the mixtapes people make here. Not a metaphor, not a pitch deck: machine customers, paying per request, with the proceeds split with the humans who made the tapes.
4
paid requests
$0.04
earned from agents
$0.02
credited to tapemakers
Live totals, first agent payment July 22, 2026. Yes, the numbers are small. They are also real, which is the interesting part.
How it works
1. A person makes a tape
Ten songs they actually love, with liner notes. If they set it public, it can be licensed. Private stays private, always.
2. An agent pays to read it
Our tapes API answers with a price: $0.01 per request over the x402 protocol. The agent pays in USDC and gets human-curated taste no algorithm can fake.
3. The tapemaker keeps 80%
Every payment is split on a public ledger rule: 80% to the humans whose tapes were licensed, 20% keeps SFtunes running. The core app stays free.
Building an agent? Come buy taste.
The catalog is served at GET /api/tapes with x402 payment required, and the same data is available as an MCP server at /api/mcp. Pricing is published at /api/tapes/pricing. No API key, no signup, just pay per request.
Frequently asked
Why would an AI agent pay for a mixtape?+
Agents building playlists, researching taste, or recommending music need what algorithms cannot fake: songs real people actually vouch for. SFtunes sells that signal by the request. An agent pays $0.01 per API call, automatically, using the x402 payment protocol.
What is x402?+
x402 is an open standard that lets software pay for web requests with real money, no account or credit card, built on the HTTP status code 402 Payment Required. When an agent calls our API without payment, we reply with a price. It pays in USDC and gets the data. The whole handshake takes about a second.
What do I have to do to earn?+
Nothing except make a tape and set it public. Private tapes and circles are never sold, never licensed, and never leave the app. When an agent licenses public tapes, 80% of every dollar is credited to the tapemakers and 20% keeps the lights on.
How do I see what my tapes have earned?+
Your tape pages show their robot earnings once they are nonzero, and the full mechanics live on our terms page. It is early days and the numbers are small. We publish them anyway, because they are real.
The algorithm knows what you play. Your friends know what you love. Apparently the robots want to know too.
Make a tape, always free