Miles Gaines was eight years old when he started making music. He was still a teenager when he entered the professional side of the industry, and from there he saw pretty much all of it up close: recording, releasing, dealing with labels and distributors, chasing down royalties, running the machinery behind an artist’s career.
That’s the part most people never see, and it’s the part that stuck with him. “As my career grew, I realized how fragmented and confusing the industry could be, especially for independent artists,” Gaines says. Artists were paying one company for distribution, another for publishing, a third for royalty tracking, then hunting down separate people for marketing and licensing and analytics. Talent wasn’t the problem. “Many artists were talented but lacked access to the tools, information, and support needed to build sustainable careers.”
So he built the thing he wished had existed. “I wanted to build the kind of platform I wished I had when I was starting out,” he says, describing OneSync as one place where independent artists and labels could handle releases, royalties, rights, analytics, marketing, and funding without bouncing between a dozen logins.
The infrastructure came together around distribution and royalty payments by mid-2024. Through 2025 it widened, and by 2026 it landed in its current shape. The company offers free distribution to Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok, Amazon Music, Tidal, and what it says is more than 400 platforms, with releases going live in as little as an hour. Artists, according to OneSync, keep ownership of their work and 100% of their royalties.
The whole pitch rides on one idea: the stuff major labels keep for themselves shouldn’t cost independents anything. OneSync says that means publishing administration, sync licensing for film, TV, ads and games, AI-powered mastering, copyright registration, playlist pitching, a beat marketplace where producers keep 85% of sales, and a direct-to-fan storefront. There’s also the money angle, royalty advances of up to $750,000 for qualifying artists, which the company frames as advances against future streaming earnings, not loans.
The team behind it has the résumé to back the pitch. Gaines is billed as a Grammy-nominated producer. Advisor Damion “Damizza” Young is credited with helping shape West Coast hip-hop. Their case is basically that the people who watched artists get taken advantage of from the inside are the right ones to build the alternative. “OneSync grew out of my own journey as an artist,” Gaines says, “and my desire to make the business of music more transparent, accessible, and empowering for other creators.”
For artists ready to scale, there’s another tier. The Elite Partner Program adds priority treatment for those hitting 100,000 monthly streams, 10,000 followers, and five released projects. Everything else, OneSync says, is there for anyone with a song to put out.
What started as one guy’s fix for too many disconnected platforms has grown into something bigger: a full operating system for an independent career. The infrastructure is built, the ambition is clear, and OneSync is putting all of it in artists’ hands for free. You can find OneSync at onesync.music and on Instagram.
