About
A small wave is still a wave.
Spotify draws two lines. Below 1,000 streams in 12 months, a track earns no recorded royalty — about $0.03 a month for the 1–1,000 band. Below 25,000 monthly listeners, an artist cannot use Spotify's Discovery Mode. Those are Spotify's own numbers, not ours.
Small Wave is a free, open-source home for the artists on the wrong side of those lines. We find them on sources that already have the rights to play them — Audius, Bandcamp, Jamendo, Creative Commons — and put them in one feed. We show the real play count when a source publishes one, and say “new” or “undiscovered” when it does not. We never invent a number.
What we play
- Audius — full tracks, open API, literal play counts.
- Bandcamp — full tracks in Bandcamp's own embedded player.
- Jamendo and Creative Commons — full tracks under the artist's licence.
- Spotify — discovery and a deep link out. We do not play Spotify audio.
What we don't do
- We don't wrap the Spotify web player or stream its catalogue.
- We don't re-host audio we don't have the rights to.
- We don't invent play counts or promise per-stream riches.
- We don't run ads, trackers, or sell data.
The app is open source: AGPL-3.0 for the server, MIT for the client. The catalogue is exportable. If you want to host your own, you can.
Are you an artist? Claim your page. It is free, non-exclusive, and yours to leave.
See source status and legal and takedown.