Commission structures, explained from the artist's side

Commission structures, explained from the artist's side. It's a decision every working artist eventually has to make, usually without a clean formula to make it with.

The decision itself

Building a collector base is less about reach and more about retention — a handful of collectors who buy again, follow a body of work across years, and refer other buyers usually matter more to a sustainable practice than a much larger one-time audience.

Licensing a digital file for commercial use is a genuinely different income stream from selling an original, with its own pricing logic — a licence fee reflects usage rights and duration, not the object itself, because there often isn't a physical object at all.

How it plays out over time

Discounting norms vary wildly by category — prints tolerate negotiation far better than one-of-one originals, mostly because a print's price was built around a run size from the start, while an original's price is closer to a single, considered number an artist won't move much on.

A marketplace with transparent, published commission rates removes a specific kind of friction that direct sales rarely resolve cleanly: knowing exactly what an artist nets from a sale before either side has to have that conversation directly.

Rei Nakamura, working out of Kyoto since 2022, is one example of how this plays out in practice — 96 sold pieces and 71 collectors in, starting with work like "Break."