We Work for Musicians: A Letter from LANDR's CEO

When we founded LANDR, we gave ourselves a simple mission: empower musicians to create and get heard.

Over the years, we added something important to it: help musicians make money from their work.
Create. Get heard. Get Paid.
A lot has changed since then. Who we work for hasn't.
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If you visit our office in Montreal, you'll see a big neon sign on the wall: **WE WORK FOR MUSICIANS.** It's been there for years, to remind everyone at LANDR who we're building for.
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But working for musicians means something else too: talking to you. And I don't think we've always done that well enough.
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LANDR has changed a lot. We've launched products, evolved products, revised pricing, added and removed features, refined how distribution works, and made hard calls around AI, fraud, royalties and the increasingly complicated rules imposed by streaming platforms.
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Sometimes we explained those decisions well. Sometimes we didn't. And sometimes we announced a change without doing a good enough job explaining why we made it.
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When you trust us with your music, you deserve more than a notification telling you something has changed. You deserve to understand why.
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So we're going to start communicating differently.
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This artist hub will be one of the places where I and others at LANDR, talk directly with you. We'll tell you what's changing and why. We'll talk about the problems we're trying to solve. And when we make difficult decisions, we'll explain the trade-offs behind them.
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LANDR serves musicians in almost every country in the world, from people releasing their first song to professionals who've been making music for decades. You don't all want the same things, and sometimes there simply isn't a decision that will make everyone happy.
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There's another reality I want to be more transparent about.
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We work for musicians. But we don't make all the rules.
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When you distribute your music through LANDR, we're connecting you to Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon, and many other platforms. Those platforms set many of the rules around what gets accepted, how music is monetized, how fraud is treated and, increasingly, how AI-generated music is handled.
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We can advocate for musicians. We can push back when we think something isn't right. We can work with our partners to influence where the industry goes. And we do.
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But we can't dictate their policies. Sometimes that means LANDR has to implement a change we didn't create. When that happens, our job is to make the best of the rules we're given while protecting your interests as much as we can.
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So here's a simple commitment. If something is our decision, we'll tell you. If it's the consequence of a platform's policy, we'll tell you that. And if we disagree with something but still have to implement it, we'll be open about that too.
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We also need to get better at listening.
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I've read the criticism of LANDR online. Some of it I disagree with. Some of it misses context we should have explained better. And some of it is completley fair.
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That last part matters most. When enough musicians tell us something isn't working, we need to listen, because the people using LANDR every day often see things the people building it can't. We need both perspectives.

We're going to make mistakes. Some of what we launch won't be perfect, and we'll change our minds sometimes.  And as AI influences almost every part of how music is created, released and consumed, we're going to have to stick our neck out from time to time.

I don't want us to become afraid of doing that. I just want us to be more open about it.

Tell you what we're doing. Tell you why. Tell you when the decision isn't entirely ours. Listen when you tell us we got something wrong. And fix it when we can.

That's the commitment.

We started LANDR because we believed technology could give musicians access to things that had been expensive, complicated, or simply out of reach. I believe that even more strongly today.
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Our job is to help you create, get heard, and get paid for your efforts.
That's what “We Work for Musicians” means.
We just need to do a better job of bringing you into the conversation.

Starting now.

Pascal Pilon
Co-founder and CEO, LANDR