Things have been fermenting here at Mirlo and we're very excited about what's brewing.
Musicians Inquiry
We are conducting an inquiry to better understand how Mirlo could work for our community and would love to hear about your experiences as a musician in the digital space. We are offering $60 USD for a 45-60 minute interview. If you are interested, please fill out the participant screener. Our researcher (Julia Tsang) will be in touch with next steps.
Want to help us cover the cost of this research? Subscribe to be a monthly supporter or buy some merch!
How we work and make decisions
We've put the finishing touches on our operating agreement: we’re aiming to create a space where artists and listeners can thrive in a fair, open, and community-driven ecosystem. As we grow, we’re excited to announce the creation of two new circles: the Hype Circle and the Code Circle.
As part of the commitment we're also looking for ways to let musicians make more decisions about how they make money. Part of our vision is a world in which people control their own platforms. To that end we have massively reduced the cost of running Mirlo on your own servers. If you're interested in that, please reach out! Of course, reducing the cost of running our servers has been important for ourselves financially too.
On that note, in March we excitedly joined this public discussion board where people are collectively thinking through what it means to build a music industry that serves us all. Join!
A small platform update
It's very exciting that people are regularly using Mirlo to buy music! We had ~$140 in sales move through the platform last month, and ~$400 in monthly support (most of that though is in supporting Mirlo). We have over 1500 albums on the platform and over 750 artists!
Technically, here's what we've been working on in the last few months:
We've been working on label features behind the scenes. Some of you have already noticed hints of this!
We're working on some basic ActivityPub integration as well as some basic RSS feed functionality
We did a massive data migration from our own MinIO data store to Backblaze
We've been working on our most requested feature to date—single track purchasing
Musicians can now choose how much of their income will go to support Mirlo
Much better visuals around blog posts
The great thing about having a live platform that people are actively using is that people are daily finding bugs for us to squash. We have a low key ambition to keep our issues under 100, but that's increasingly harder and harder.
And what we're hoping to accomplish in the next few months:
Further integration with ActivityPub and better use of standards to integrate with a search engine Ben at Bandwagon has been working on
Figuring out label functionality and piloting that
Releasing single track purchasing
Shoring up our "self install" processes and functionality
On that note, here's our profit & loss for Q1 2025.
We spent a bit of money this month, and that primarily is our baseline server costs. But those will go down going forward! You'll also note that we're mostly earning money from direct support. You can help us cover operating costs by pitching in! Finally, you'll notice two major expense categories. We paid for an accountant, cause it's tax season, and we've paid for two design projects. The first is for our Kickstarter t-shirts from last year which is being designed by Transverse Co-operative, while the second was for a visual treatment of our front page and general design work by Hazel at Mergoat. We're very excited to have worked with both, who are each doing radical and inspirational work in our community.
Want to support and continue seeing an open source platform that centers artist input and building a deeper understanding on how we value and share music? Support us with a monthly gift.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/post/237