A fan in a bar pays to hear a song. The artist keeps the money and gets the fan's name. Then we hand them everything needed to do something with it. A proposed combination of two separate companies. Not yet executed. Confidential, for the named recipient only. Not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security.
Cash in a jar. No list, no record, no proof they were ever there. Tomorrow they do it again, and it accumulates into nothing.
TipSee gets the fan's name. The Front Office turns that name into a career. Neither company can build the other's half. ArtistOS is the proposed name for a combination of two separate companies. No ArtistOS entity exists today. The combination is agreed in principle and has not been executed. Break the Signal holds no licence to the patent above. This round is conditional on that closing.
Today TipSee owns steps one to three and the Front Office owns steps four and five. They share no table, no route and no identifier. Joining them into one fan record is the first thing this round builds.
The artist sets the price per song, marks it played, and payment settles to their own account. A good Tuesday clears a couple of hundred dollars in requests — and every one of those payments arrives attached to a name. The screens above are design mockups, and the figures in them are illustrative. We will not publish a per-night average until we have twenty-five rooms of them.
Their website, the fan list, campaigns drafted for approval, merch, ticketing, markets and routing, advance sheets, releases, press and the money. The manager, tour manager, business manager and band all work in the same system — twelve roles, enforced on the server, tested. An AI front office drafts the work: Mona on management, Cash on social, Paige publicist, Vera booking, Mick merch — finished work that files itself into the calendar, the pitch list and the store when you approve it. One tap, and every approval is a signed record. That screenshot is our own product with nothing in it, because nobody has bought anything yet. We publish a live scorecard of exactly what is and is not built at hardticket.app/receipts, linked from our own homepage. It currently reads: zero real orders, seventy-nine broadcasts written and none delivered, no booking pipeline.
Every night adds to a payment-backed record of rooms played and draw by market. Not who says they played — whose card was charged in the room. Two years in, leaving means abandoning the proof.
Capture the moment, tool the career, sell the audience. Each layer makes the next possible. Slide 14 is everyone who owns one of them, and nobody who owns the chain.
$21,300
Median annual music income for a US musician, in 2018 dollars. Sixty-one per cent say it does not cover living expenses. The companies that tried to charge this customer mostly did not survive it. The ones that did are small, and priced under twenty-five dollars a month. Music Industry Research Association with the Princeton University Survey Research Center, 2018, n=1,227. Still the citation of record: the BLS publishes an hourly wage for this occupation and no annual figure, and excludes the self-employed, who are half of it.
The artist buys an office because it replaces one they cannot afford to staff. They never pay for the thing that is free everywhere else.
Per 150-cap room per month: 20 artist-nights, ~90 attending, 1,800 attendee-nights.
Merch GMV is gross consumer spend in the room, not our revenue. Our revenue is the take.
Derived from atVenu's $45 per buyer at small shows × 15–20% conversion = $6.75–9.00 per head.
Note what atVenu's headline actually says: its $64 is spend per buyer, not per head — only 23% of fans buy anything. Read literally it overstates merch four-fold, and the all-time record merch night was $44.48 a head. Nobody publishes tips per show or local sponsorship rates at this tier. That is precisely what the twenty-five rooms are for.
We built this model before we raised and it killed our own price. The venue is the unit that works. The artist only works if you charge like an office instead of an app. Internal model, unaudited, run at low, base and high. Churn of 4.29% a month is the Recurly benchmark for the $10–25 band, not ours — we have none of our own yet.
Live Nation adjusted operating income margin by segment, Q2 2026.
Non-GAAP, as reported by the company.
Concerts grew 8% in revenue and lost 14% of its profit. Sponsorship is 5.9% of
concerts revenue and 83% of its profit.
Below the superstar tier that margin barely exists, because a brand cannot do three hundred deals with three hundred bar bands. Aggregation is the unlock.
"All PROs who responded to this question reported that they use proxy or survey data for royalty distributions, to some extent. … Proxy or survey data appears to be most often used to supplement incomplete data for performances at smaller live performance venues and by general licensees." United States Copyright Office, Summary of Comments, at 19. Transmitted to the House Judiciary Committee, 20 November 2025.
PickleJar, Tiply, Rekwest — the tip jar. The moment, no system, and all three are free to the artist. PickleJar is Nashville, and its published pricing places the fee on the fan.
Laylo — artist CRM. $8M raised, marquee artists, no round publicly disclosed since 2022. Reach, no capture.
Bandsintown — fan discovery, from $274/mo for venues, billed annually. Intent, not money.
Prism, Muzeek, Gigwell — booking workflow for people who already book.
atVenu — $2B+ processed annually, company-reported. Ops for touring acts, nothing below the club.
Sessions — a Pandora co-founder made tipping the revenue line. It shut in December 2022, and creators publicly reported unpaid balances.
Rival — $30M+ raised, founded by a former Ticketmaster CEO. It never reached a public on-sale, and the team went to Ticketmaster.
Songkick — ~$60M raised. Its antitrust claim against Live Nation settled for a reported $110M in 2018, after its ticketing business had already closed.
Jaxsta — 240M credits, hibernated December 2025: "the commercial model was not scalable in its current form."
Bkstg — roughly $20M raised for direct-to-fan. Its CEO and president both departed and the product has not shipped since.
Nobody here died of competition. They died of transaction volume that never arrived, and of charging a customer with no money. And not one of them holds both the capture and the career.
"Take rates here are going to zero." They are. PickleJar is 0% to the artist, Bandzoogle 0% on sales, Grin abandoned take-rate for subscription. Which is why capture is free and the revenue sits with the office, the venue and the brand.
"Small rooms are shrinking." Sub-500-cap attendance fell 1% last year while stadiums grew 6%. The contraction is why venues will take a system that tells them which act drives bar spend.
"That is the worst churn band in SaaS." Benchmark churn at this price point is 4.29% monthly, about 41% a year. We have none of our own yet. The venue record is the switching cost no pure-SaaS competitor has.
"Nobody is funding live-music tooling." In August 2026 a live-entertainment financial-operations company raised a $5M seed led by TTV Capital, with three working operators on the cap table — an artist manager, a management-company founder and a festival founder. That is the shape of this round: one fund that understands payments, and people who have stood in the room.
"Toast gives hardware away." So do we. Hardware is about $550 a room. It is customer acquisition, not a revenue line.
"25 venues in 18 months is slow." It is 1.4 a month, deliberately, and it is two corridors rather than scattered rooms. One operator runs nine rooms on Lower Broadway — a third of the target in a single contract, and half a street a brand can buy as one placement. The second corridor is East Nashville, where the rooms are independent and the strain is public: a Five Points venue is currently selling a support pass to cover last year. Ten per cent of a city is a sample.
The combination is not executed. Two separate companies, agreed in principle. This round is conditional on closing it, and on a Delaware entity that can issue the instrument.
The patent is Tipsee's. US 12,511,587 B2, inventor Dallas Jackson, assignee Tipsee Music LLC. It comes with the combination or it does not come. We have not had counsel opine on the scope of the granted claims and will not characterise them until they have.
No transactions on the Front Office. Built and unsold. One Stripe platform key and one artist's bank onboarding stand between the store and its first sale. Fan email stays locked by choice until artists are onboarded.
No booking pipeline. No holds, avails or offers. What exists is markets and routing intelligence, and we renamed it in our own product for exactly that reason.
Unproven audio. We ship artist-confirms. Audio recognition stays on the roadmap.
Slow rosters. Every artist is a veto point. Two quarters, not one month.
We would rather you heard all of this from us. The live version is at hardticket.app/receipts, counted automatically, on our own marketing site, today.
What it buys: one artist tracked from bar tip to ticketed show on the same fan record, and the first measured dataset of what a small room is actually worth. At 250-plus venues, Nashville has roughly six times the live-venue density per capita of New York or Tokyo. Nashville Independent Venues Study, Metro Nashville with the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce, 2024.
Brian Kaplan · Break the Signal, LLC · Nashville
brian@breakthesignal.com
