A musical idea isn’t a dead end. It’s the root of a tree.
The hard part of paying everyone fairly was never the math — it was knowing who built on whom. GitTunes records that as the work happens. Here’s the canonical example: Alice commits a stem, Bob forks it, Carol lists a package built on it. When a buyer licenses it in-platform, the fee routes up the graph on its own. Drag the slider — it sets the license price.
Provenance example (in-platform licensing). Alice's original stem is forked twice, and each of those is forked twice — 6 descendants. If every one licenses their package for €1,000, a share routes up the graph to Alice each time: €200 from each of the two direct forks and €40 from each of the four forks-of-forks, totalling €560. Closer forks route more; distant ones a thinner slice.
The price the lister set — a loop, full stems, or an exclusive. Not streaming earnings.
the origin (Alice) a fork that licensed
Closer forks route more; a fork-of-a-fork pays a cut of a cut. Split defaults vary by fork type.
How does Alice keep earning after her stem is reused?
Her authorship is signed once and recorded on the graph. Every fork carries that provenance, so each time a package built on her stem is licensed, a share routes back to her — without her chasing anyone.
Why does a fork-of-a-fork pay Alice less?
Splits route up one hop at a time, so a distant license reaches her as a cut of a cut. Proximity to the origin is rewarded; lineage still pays, just thinner the further out it goes. Defaults vary by fork type — see the protocol.
What the graph buys you
Provenance, not paperwork
Every stem, fork, and remix is signed and linked to its source. Attribution isn’t a spreadsheet you maintain — it’s a property of the file.
Splits that route themselves
License a package in-platform and the fee flows up the graph to everyone it was built on. No chasing, no clearance maze, no “unofficial” remix that pays nobody.
A tree, not a dead end
A folder of files forgets where anything came from. A provenance graph remembers — so an idea can be forked, sampled, and remixed without erasing the people behind it.
The 60/20/20 above is illustrative of that example, not a fixed rule — split defaults come from each fork’s type. The honest details live in the protocol.
This is in-platform licensing — the price is set by the creator, and the fee splits on our rail. When a track earns out in the world (Spotify, Beatport), GitTunes doesn’t collect that money; it hands your distributor a clean split sheet, linked by ISRC, to pay everyone against. We’re the split-sheet-of-record, not the payment processor.
See it in your own projects
A prototype’s running now. Join the early access list and we’ll bring you in as it opens up.