Users, teams & organisations

What it is

Aden is built from four things that connect to each other. Keeping them distinct is what makes the platform work:

• A user is you — your login and personal profile. A user never holds a plan and never owns content directly.
• A team is your workspace. Every track, album, session, contact and release plan lives inside a team. A team is the only thing that carries a subscription.
• An organisation is an industry entity — a label, distributor, publisher, PRO, booking agency, studio, management company or writer camp. Organisations don't hold their own tracks; they connect to artist teams to manage the relationship, and they can run sessions of their own.
• A session is a time-boxed event where people make music together — a studio day, a writing session, or a whole writer camp. A session belongs to a team (and optionally to an organisation) and gathers the users taking part.

How it all connects

These are the relationships that tie the four things together:

Read it as four sentences:

• user → team → organisation — you belong to a team, and your team links to the organisations it works with. This is how most artists reach an organisation: through their team, never as a lone person.
• user → organisation — some people belong to an organisation directly, as its owner, admin or member. This is the path for the people who run a label, publisher, PRO, agency or writer camp.
• session → users — a session pulls people together: the organiser who created it, plus the participants (team-mates and outside collaborators).
• organisation → sessions — an organisation can host sessions itself, which is exactly how a writer camp works: the camp organiser schedules sessions and invites writers from across many teams.

Two ways you connect to an organisation

There are two completely different reasons you might be tied to an organisation, and they use different paths:

• Through a team (managed artist). Your team gets linked to the organisation — the org invites your team, invites you by email and you pick one of your teams, or your team asks to join and the org approves. The organisation can then see and help with your team's work, but you are still just a member of your own team.
• Directly (you run the org). If you are the label owner, the publisher, the PRO administrator or the writer-camp organiser, you are a member of the organisation itself (as owner, admin, member or viewer). Org owners and admins also reach the teams their organisation manages — that is what lets a label manager work across their whole roster.

You can be both at once: directly run one organisation while your personal artist team is managed by another.

Sessions: where the work actually happens

A session is the unit of real collaboration. It always belongs to a team, can optionally belong to an organisation, and gathers the users taking part:

• A normal team session is hosted by one team; participants are usually that team's members plus a few invited guests.
• A writer camp is run by an organisation — the camp organiser hosts the sessions, and writers are invited in from many different teams, so one session can connect people who otherwise have no team in common.
• Either way, each participant can carry their own revenue splits, so a session is also where credits and royalties start. (See the Sessions guide for the full detail on recording, markers and splits.)

Two more relationships round out the picture:

• A team can hold a contract with an organisation — the agreement is attached to the link between your team and that org, and lives inside Aden.
• An organisation can sit under a parent organisation — a publishing group above its sub-labels, or a network above its stations.

And because a user belongs to teams rather than to content directly:

• You can be in one team (just you, or your band), or many teams at once — your own project, a side project, and a team a label set up for you — and switch between them anytime.

How paying works

There are no personal subscriptions and no organisation-member subscriptions — only team subscriptions. You unlock paid features by having a team on a paid plan (Air → Pro → Ultra → Max).

A team's plan can be paid in three ways, and they all behave identically once active:

1. You pay for your own team — the normal upgrade on the team's Plan page.
2. Aden grants it — comped from the back office.
3. Your organisation pays for your team — under an enterprise deal, the org covers the plan for the teams on its roster.

So if you're part of an organisation, your organisation can pick up the bill for your team while you keep working exactly as a self-paid team would.

Some capabilities require an active team subscription somewhere in your account — not necessarily your current team. If any team you belong to is on a high enough plan, you get those perks even while sitting in a free personal team. (Aden Fast, the instant-navigation perk, works this way.)

The three ways to onboard

Everyone ends up in the same ecosystem, but you can come in through a different door:

1. Register free as a user

Sign up, and a short wizard helps you create your first team. You start on the Free plan with an in-app checklist that walks you through your first upload, share and publish. You can create up to two free teams and explore before paying.

2. Upgrade a team (single plan)

When your team grows, open the team's Plan page and pick Air, Pro, Ultra or Max (monthly or yearly). Checkout runs through Polar; features unlock the moment payment clears. Invite collaborators up to your plan's seat limit.

3. Enterprise (an organisation onboards its roster)

A label, publisher or agency brings its whole roster in at once. They submit their roster (publicly at /organisations/enterprise, or with our team), Aden sets up the organisation and creates a team for each artist, and the organisation's deal pays for those teams. Org managers get access across the roster; each artist gets their own workspace. Organisations can also subscribe at the org level to unlock org-wide features independently of the teams they manage.

Growing inside the ecosystem

The value compounds the more of your world is on Aden. When your labels, agencies, publishers and writers' camps exist here as organisations — and your collaborators exist as teams — submissions, approvals, contracts and splits flow inside the platform instead of over email. Aden ships with hundreds of well-known industry entities already in the directory, so the people you work with are usually already here; anything missing you can add (it's reviewed before it goes live). Every new connection makes the next collaboration easier, because everyone stays in the loop on the same artist.