01 / BAZAAR
LOADING
LOADING
A label, a marketplace, a studio, a tribe - built in Berlin
ZIKADA is the open-source underground: artist shops, a media-first promo studio, a mood-indexed feed, and a community that funds the infrastructure around the music.
◆ A SCENE BROKE, SO WE REBUILT THE INFRASTRUCTURE.
We watched it happen in our own city. A resident DJ — warehouse nights, peak-time sets, the room singing every drop — was moonlighting in a warehouse of another kind to keep the lights on. The music was everywhere.
ZIKADA is four connected tools — a marketplace, a studio, a feed, and a tribe. Each works alone. Together they form the full loop: create, release, circulate, fund.
You don't need a signed release to open a stall. You just need something worth making. Records, posters, synths, patches, illustrations, clothes, hand-pressed dubs — everything ships through the same open counter.
Etsy took a handmade idea and turned it into a dropshipper casino: 6.5% transaction fee, 15¢ listing, 15% offsite ads they enrol you in, "Etsy Ads" auction, sellers undercut by mass-produced resellers pretending to be a local workshop. You paid them to compete against machines.
ZIKADA's Bazaar is built for the opposite outcome: no paid placement, no listing fees, no forced ads, human-curated categories. Physical goods get a shipping handler; digital goods get instant delivery. Makers keep 97% — the 3% runs the servers and payouts.
So we started asking the wrong question out loud: what would a label look like if it stopped extracting from artists and started investing in them? If the marketplace was free, the studio was shared, the tribe funded the soundsystem, and every euro went back into the scene — transparently, publicly, in real time?
That's ZIKADA. Not a streaming service. Not a record label in the old sense. An open-source underground — infrastructure the scene owns.
— THE ZIKADA OPERATIVES · BERLIN · APRIL 2026
Legacy labels still take 70–85% of every euro. We take 0% on Bazaar sales. Stripe takes its processing cut; the rest lands in your account the day it clears.
▸ ZERO-FEE · FOREVERNobody describes a track by its BPM at 4am. Our tribe tags tracks with the feelings they leave — a shared vocabulary, indexed from listeners inward.
▸ COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS100% of ZIKADA revenue — subscriptions, merch, ticketing — is reinvested into soundsystems, residencies and gear. Tracked live on the GOALMAP. Open books.
▸ RADICAL TRANSPARENCYEvery artist gets a storefront. Sell vinyl, digital, stems, merch, tickets, zines. We charge nothing — Stripe Connect handles the processing, you get paid direct.
Release management, promo scene-builder, analytics, stems exchange. The studio your label imagined, minus the label.
The opposite of an algorithm. Tune by mood, by label, by operator, by soundsystem. The tribe curates. No pay-to-play, no ads.
Hub, events, blog, roadmap, goalmap. The label runs in the open. Decisions debated. Goals co-funded. Revenue visible.
Not just records. Physical + digital for everyone — including makers who never signed a release. Paid by tribe, shipped by makers.
Underground music drowns under same-looking square art. The ZIKADA Studio gives every release a cinematic treatment — motion, colour, type — then exports it for reels, screens, banners, print.
// SIGNAL LOG
Every release lands first in the tribe — members get 48h early access, pay-what-you-want on digital, and first dibs on limited vinyl pressings.
// FROM THE STORES
ZIKADA doesn't take profit. 100% of revenue — Bazaar fees-that-aren't, subscriptions, event tickets, merch — is reinvested into the scene: soundsystems, residencies, studio gear, artist stipends. The GOALMAP is our live ledger. You can watch the money move.
Monthly €500 grants for 4 unsigned operatives. Funded from Bazaar volume.
Co-owned mastering room. Free hours for ZIKADA artists. First pass: monitors + converters.
12 nights, 24 artists, 2.4k attendees. All surplus routed back to stipends.
across bazaar · subs · tickets · merch
100% · audited each quarter · receipts open
in the last 12 months · 5 in flight
subs + one-time · avg €3.40 / mo
Genres are dead signage — cataloguing conventions from an era when records had sleeves and nobody had to describe a feeling at 4am. We let the tribe tag tracks with the moods they leave. A shared vocabulary for what the scene already knows how to name.
The algorithm / knows your taste.
The tribe knows your feeling.
Only one of them / has been at the afters with you.
// search:"sub-aquatic" · 48 tracks · 12 labels · 0 algorithms. Played for six hours straight. Sofia from Lisbon tagged three new ones before the sun came up.
You're in the set. Something lands. The word for it isn't "techno" — it's "sub-aquatic at 4am".
Tap to tag from the cloud or coin a new one. Coinages are moderated by the tribe; the best stick.
Every tag updates the feed. Artists see how their tracks land emotionally. Labels learn new signal.
"sub-aquatic" returns 48 tracks across 12 labels. An algorithm would have shown you six of them. Maybe.
coined by the tribe · curated hourly
+247% · 64 new tracks tagged
of releases have ≥3 mood tags
08 / Upcoming
Tribe members book into ZIKADA nights before the general public, get ticket refunds routed back to goals, and chat with the operatives in the Hub.
Bring a stem, leave with a remix. Studio hours, free for tribe.
Quarterly open-books session. Ask anything about the ledger.
No VCs. No board. No ad sales team. A small crew of operatives who got tired of watching underground music feed a pipeline that didn't feed it back. Each card is a real role on the rota.
▸ FIVE OPERATIVES · MORE ON THE WAY
VIEW ALL ARTISTSFOUNDER · A&R · RESIDENT
aka SPEKTA · 3886 Records · Bonn
"I ran a label for eight years. I booked nights for fourteen. The sound is still here. The people are still here. The pipes were what broke."
Resident DJ at Bonn Goa Backstage since 2011. Co-founded 3886 Records with Julian Dare in 2012 — over 60 releases spanning progressive, psy, and full-on. Plays live as SPEKTA. Still at the N8Lounge every second Friday when there's a signal.
FOUNDER · PLATFORM · RESIDENT
aka [zady] · producer · Köln
"I made a track. It got 4 million plays. I got €319. I could either accept it, or build the thing that refused to."
Producer and engineer, active since 2018 under [zady]. Wrote the first ZIKADA spec on a train to Bonn in January 2024. Still records in a converted garage in Köln-Ehrenfeld. Releases ZKD-041 / wishlist this spring as a first-party artifact of the new pipes.
CO-FOUNDER · A&R
aka SASH-EEOI · curator · Berlin
"Curation isn't taste. It's making sure the room finds the track and the track finds the room."
Resident at Arkaoda. Programmes the Wednesday slot at Wohnzimmer. Built the first mood-tag taxonomy across 4,200 tracks before the platform existed. Picks the warm-ups everyone steals.
RESIDENT · DEVELOPER
aka OP_19 · engineer · Leipzig
"We're shipping the pipes. The water moves itself."
Backend lead. Wrote the Goalmap ledger and the Stripe-Connect routing layer. Releases ambient under OPERATOR 19. Rarely posts, always commits.
RESIDENT · STUDIO ENGINEER
aka KÖR · mastering · Hamburg
"Mastering for free, paid by the goal. The room owns the room."
Mastering engineer behind the ZIKADA Studio Master Suite goal. Built the in-house monitoring chain. Hosts open stems sessions every other Sunday.
Every feature proposal debated in the Hub. Tribe subs weigh the votes. Shipping cadence matches the release cadence — every six weeks, something new lands.
Zero-fee marketplace, release management, Scene Studio builder, mood-indexed feed, Hub, Goalmap.
▸ 100% shippedUpload & licence stems. Remix chain attribution. New composition loops — multi-artist, splits baked in.
▸ 642 tribe votesNative live sessions from the studio. Chat, tips, mood-tagging in real time. DJ mode + live-stem mode.
▸ 1.204 tribe votesOpen signings. Tribe surfaces talent, co-funds first releases, shares in revenue through the Goalmap.
▸ proposal openZIKADA is free to join, free to sell on, and — because we don't take profit — free to trust. Artists get the storefront, studio and tribe the day they sign up. Listeners get a feed tuned by moods, not ad budgets.
▸ NO CREDIT CARD · NO GATEKEEPERS · OPEN BOOKS · EXPORT ANY TIME
