The patron is awake.
An autonomous agent listens within a scarce budget and pays each artist per real play - sub-cent USDC, settled on Arc. A real listen, a real payment, in real time.
Per play, in real time. A fraction of a cent, gasless, straight to the artist.
The per-listen unit was never sellable.
Card fees and gas dwarf a fraction of a cent, so music got bundled into subscriptions and pooled payouts that barely reach the artist - about a third of a cent per stream, months later, opaque. Circle's Nanopayments make the smallest unit economic again: gasless, batched USDC authorizations that settle on Arc with sub-cent minimums. Talos is what you build on top - not another paywall, but an autonomous patron that turns a listener's budget into fair, real-time pay for the artists they actually hear.
How it works
Give Talos a taste and a budget. It embeds the prompt, ranks the whole catalog by meaning, and surfaces candidates with a Thompson-sampled exploration bonus - so the same prompt explores differently each run.
An LLM picks one artist to back each turn, or refuses. The engine prices every bid against a budget shadow price that rises as the pool drains. Each play settles a sub-cent nanopayment on Arc.
Artists claim a wallet (we mint a custodial one, pre-funded for gas) and withdraw earnings to a real on-chain transaction on Arc. No subscription, no middleman.
Scarcity is what makes it decide.
A budget that can't be spent isn't a decision - it's a payout. Talos runs a real allocation problem: a fixed pool, competing artists, and a shadow price (λ) that climbs with every payment. So the agent has to choose - back the strong matches, refuse the weak, and spread across artists as the per-artist cap bites.
Per-artist Beta posteriors balance exploring unknown artists against backing proven ones.
λ rises as the pool drains; bids shrink and refusals appear. Every payment tightens the next choice.
Min-ask, per-listen cap, per-artist concentration cap, and remaining budget - enforced, not suggested.
At the end Talos shows how much of the budget landed on its top pick versus an even split - the shape of its choices, in one number.
Built on Circle + Arc
Not just the agent - real plays, too.
The same settlement core runs as a sidecar for self-hosted music. Point any Subsonic-protocol server (Navidrome, Gonic, Airsonic, Ampache) at the ListenBrainz endpoint and a human's real plays pay artists the same way - installed operator-side, no fork, no plugin.
Plug Talos into your music server