Indeed. Social networks are what’s left between us when there’s no more electricity ; decentralized social media enable social networks, while so-called (online) social networks operated by corporations aim not to serve the community but to channel people’s attention towards products and advertising. In some cases (e.g., buying music) this can make sense, and the Bandcamp model is certainly one of the least noxious among all of those: it betters the situation for artists in comparison to the music industry and allows to pay for critiques and journalists. Yet, a cooperative and decentralized model makes a step further by giving full control to the artists and their fans, away from the profit motive and into the community (self-)service, liberating a cultural “product” from market capture.
Guerilla VML
A couple of decades ago was floating an idea of “guerilla virtual music label”, that would offer a repository of elements composing a music album: cover, titles, tracks… Musicians would pick up those elements and propose an album to the public; the public would buy in, and eventually and vinyl press would be done, and all benefits would go to a concert where everybody involved would meet each other; then the music would be available online under a free license.
We thought about “guerilla virtual music label” as a pre-sale scheme and concert thing. The idea was not so much to “compensate” artists with sales, than to enable the creation of an album at (almost) no cost, and to create community around live music. We were thinking about an alternative approach to the industry. There was also another interesting alternative venue, Le Placard, that had some out-of-the-box concerts, like in 2004 in Barcelona, where some famous musicians from the Sonar festival came to play for free at L’Antic Teatre where we had the garden for ourselves, playing for headphones and enjoying the quietness of the place.
(@staff: this discussion should be split into a new topic not to derail the Introductions! – I’d be happy to play silent mod for that kind of things.)
Compensation could work simply by splitting any profits (after transparent expenses) among all collaborators equally. This is some work, but it’s not impossible.
Or, to make it simpler, the budget could be kept at 0 balance, but there would be a LiberaPay donation page with all collaborators taking equal cut automatically.
Another option is OpenCollective where the budget is public and everyone can see where donation (or paid) money goes.
We had a chat with OpenCollective folks to try and facilitate something like this! I think they’d be interested in being the API for something like this, and we were thinking you could use a Mirlo or something like it to store the music (though tbh, you could also just use Mirlo at that stage, just more as a “label” (nested brackets, in the work), and it’d probably be cheaper, but you’d need someone to hold the money, or find a fiscal sponsor)