Music Freedom
since 2012.

Founder

Joey Ricard

Joey grew up in Key West and studied Information Technology at Florida State University. He started his first company at 22 while still in school — an on-campus tech shop — hired fellow students, and later spent a year in Los Angeles around the music industry.

In 2012 he was living in Germany. Pandora did not work there. Spotify had barely arrived, and the catalogs were thin. He built TuneBash so anyone could search a song and play it — without paying a dollar a track, and without being locked to one country’s store.

2012

Music should work everywhere

The original product offered free unlimited streaming when most services charged a subscription or ran ads. People were already leaving CD ownership for digital files. Joey’s question was simple: why buy one song for a dollar when a month of listening cost about the same?

TuneBash LLC was formed in Florida on October 8, 2012 — after the technology had already been built. Florida record L12000127890.

For artists

Not just a player

The March 2013 investor deck described TuneBash as a free streaming platform that connects artists to fans. Listeners could search any song and find concerts near them. Artists got a music intelligence dashboard: who was listening, and where those listeners were.

That was the point. Streaming royalties to artists were close to nothing, and the big services did not give musicians their own audience data. TuneBash indexed an artist’s music from across the web, showed them the map of their fans, and let them reach those people with merchandise, tickets, and live experiences — the real business around the recording.

The April 2013 launch called it The Music Freedom Project: people everywhere want to find music freely, and artists should be able to meet the fans who already care.

The bet

Streaming costs would fall

Joey’s 2012 read was that streaming was the future, and that the cost of streaming a catalog would keep dropping — storage got cheaper, bandwidth got cheaper, and advertising on streams would grow. The large platforms understood the same math. The industry just had not finished pricing it.

Internet radio was overpaying relative to satellite. In 2012 Pandora spent about 56% of revenue on performance royalties, while Sirius XM paid about 8%. The Copyright Royalty Board then set Sirius XM in the 9–11% range for 2013–2017. Online and satellite were not the same product, but the gap showed the web was carrying a heavier load.

Apple later walked into radio and streaming with the leverage of iTunes. That reset what labels would accept. Spotify, which had been building for people who live in music, was in a position to scale as those unit costs came down. TuneBash was built on that curve: if listening itself got cheap, the value would move to discovery, fans, and the night you actually show up.

2013–2014

A public record, then a pause

SEC filings from 2013 and 2014 identify Joey Ricard as the founder of TuneBash and as an officer of Development Capital Group. TuneBash, Inc., a Delaware corporation, appears in those records. The original company later went inactive, and Joey moved on to other technology work.

2026

Real music, not just the file

Streaming won. Catalogs are everywhere. The unfinished problem is the one TuneBash started with: discovery, artist economics, and control. Music Freedom still means you choose what to play. The rest is experiencing real music with artists — rooms, cities, tours — not only their digital byproducts.

The 2026 TuneBash is a free, simple listening tool with that sharper purpose. Listeners search, play, and discover without a paywall. Artists get audience and market intelligence. Advertising is optional, not the product.