ONE BIG FRIEND
The Artist-Owned Creative Sanctuary
A real place. A real community.
Built for the artists who make the music.
Built for the artists who make the music.
“Music isn’t a category — it’s a current running through everything.”
The journey
Music is connection made audible. The people who make it deserve more than a payout — they deserve a home.
One Big Friend began with a simple observation: the industry has never built a true home for the people who make the music — a real place where artists create, rest, perform, and belong, surrounded by a community that shows up for them.
So we are building it. A sanctuary, a membership, and a culture — designed around human connection first, with technology only where it serves that connection.
A real place to create, rest, and belong — not another feed to feed.
Participation in culture, not just consumption of it.
When creators are supported, culture improves. When culture improves, people thrive.
Recorded music has never been bigger — and working artists have never felt smaller. They perform for algorithms, tour at a loss, and go home to inboxes instead of communities.
The economics are broken. But the deeper break is human: no place of their own, no room to rest, and no people at their backs. The result is an industry rich in music — and poor in belonging.
What’s missing isn’t another app.
It’s a place — and a people.
of artists earn less than $1,000 a year from streaming
typical artist share of revenue — after deductions
average payout per stream ($0.003–$0.005)
A 10-acre creative campus outside Austin — studios, stages, lodging, gardens, and wellness under one sky.
An invited, values-aligned collective of artists who show up for each other, on and off stage.
Writing retreats, recording residencies, and VIP fan experiences that bring art and audience together.
Pro recording studios, co-writing rooms, live performance spaces, and on-campus festival infrastructure.
Gardens, healing spaces, and the kind of quiet that lets a creative career actually last.
Our technology partner for fan-direct monetization and fair payouts — so One Big Friend stays human.
The rules of the house — written before the house is built.
Partners, investors, employees, and artists must love the mission — no exceptions.
Incentives aligned between artists and fans, in every product and every deal.
Open economics, open governance, open incentives — nothing hidden, nothing opaque.
People curate, welcome, and decide here. Technology serves; it never leads.
Built with members and owned by the mission — never captive to extractive capital.
No hostage capital. No extractive deals. Long-term impact over short-term gains.
A 10-acre creative campus outside Austin — a home for the soul of music.
Curated multi-day retreats bring artists to the sanctuary to write, collaborate, and reset.
Week- and month-long residencies in world-class studios with peers and mentors.
Live shows, VIP fan retreats, and recorded sets broadcast to the global OBF community.
Training, mentorship, and monetization through the Ekho platform partnership.
Artists arrive, create, perform, grow — and return. A durable creative career, built inside a community that has their back.
ONE BIG FRIENDTwo ventures. One aligned mission. One Big Friend cultivates the artists, music, and stories. Ekho — an independent company led by CEO Michael Jelen — provides the fair, global engine to reach fans and get paid. OBF stays human; Ekho scales the economics.
Recurring membership plus residency & event revenue, scaling with sanctuary capacity.
Lifelong singer, songwriter, and dancer whose voice has topped charts worldwide — and a lifelong advocate for artists and the rights they’re still fighting for.
CEO of Ekho — the fair-pay platform partner that powers OBF’s digital economy.
Launch the global artist community and build the first creative sanctuary in Austin.
We’re gathering $5 million in support to launch One Big Friend — a global artist community and a physical creative home in the Austin area.
Studios, stages, lodging, gardens, and wellness spaces — designed for artist retreats, recording residencies, on-campus festivals, and fan experiences.
Monetization and reach are delivered through our technology partnership with Ekho, so OBF can stay focused on people, place, and culture.