As you may have already seen, we've been working with FairPlayer towards a new social standard in music listening. But "who are FairPlayer?" we hear you ask, and for that matter, "who are Mirlo?" Well, let us answer some of those questions now, as we interview one another about the who and why of this work. What follows is an interview between Carles, Nico, Marcel and Guillem of FairPlayer and Alex, Louis-Louise and Roberta from Mirlo.
Fairplayer asks Mirlo
Your legal form is a worker cooperative in USA. Why did you choose this one?
Alex: We are registered in Washington, DC as a Limited Liability Company (LLC) with a cooperative operating agreement. When the group that formed Mirlo started, we weren’t sure if we even wanted to have a formal legal structure, but this became necessary in order to create a protoype that could process electronic payments. We chose to be based in the USA because three of the five group members were legal residents there, including the one who was willing to do the legwork of setting up a bank account. We decided to form an LLC because it was the most flexible legal structure for a small, bootstrapped initiative without employees. The flexibility allowed for us to write an innovative operating agreement that guarantees shared ownership and decision-making by unanimous consent.
Which communication tools do you use for your community?
Roberta: We exist within a combination of federated, or interconnected social media spaces such as musician.social, The Social Music Network and PeerTube plus more mainstream tools, such as Instagram and Discord. We have talked about the merits and pitfalls of each previously but using both kinds of tools allows us to bridge the gap between places with less friction (namely those offered by corporate entities which most people are already familiar with) and those interlinked, non-corporate platforms that prioritise autonomy but often take more in terms of time investment to set up, although many entities within the Fediverse are recognising this and providing easier ways for people to sign up and focusing on the social aspect of what they offer beyond the technical definitions. Over time, Mirlo will also be joining the Fediverse and we’re hoping to learn from our different experiences across these platforms to create a positive, encouraging and easy-to-use tool for musicians and listeners which can “talk” to other music platforms and things like Mastodon. We’ve been very lucky as well to have such an engaged community of listeners and musicians on the Fediverse and on our Discord, particularly as we’ve never spent any money on advertising.
The decision team (Stewards) is quite small. Are you concerned about mantaining the horizontality? If so, what measures have you adopted?
Alex: Mirlo was formed out of a group of five people based in different places who met through our involvement with previous digital music cooperative projects (Ampled and Resonate). Our experiences with those projects, which both featured elaborate multi-stakeholder governance models that were not able to be upheld in practice, led us to focus on building our cooperative model slowly and by focusing on building trust through working together. The first step along these lines was a commitment to unanimous consent among the members—that the group would not “overrule” an objection leveled by any other member. We have enshrined this in our operating agreement and also set the intention of an “Exit to Community”, meaning that our goal is to create the necessary infrastructure, culture, and practices that will allow our founders to rotate out of the core team once systems of community governance are in place (rather than selling the company or taking it public on the stock market). Building that community is an ongoing process that requires patience and curiosity. I have a hunch that the next step in this process towards horizontality would be for this team to band together with other aligned projects (like Fairplayer!) in the spirit of “cooperation among cooperatives”.
How do you envision the future of the music distribution ecosystem? Is decentralization a challenge?
Roberta: Part of the challenge of decentralisation is the language around it, as we’ve alluded to above, which often prioritises the technical above the social and, whilst this is important, it often fails to speak to the immediacy of someone looking to join a new place to communicate with friends and interact with culture or just post memes. One of the recent things we posted to try to counter this, was a book review about indie labels in the UK over several decades, in which the concept of decentralisation is described in terms that are much easier to visualise. In the book, this concept is a network of regional indie record shops that managed themselves in their area and acted as specialists for their local scene but they could also plug into a wider distribution network nationally to stock their shops and cross-pollinate with other areas. It is this idea that we want to transfer into digital terms.
Artists get compensated by selling their albums and merch on Mirlo. Have you considered any system of monetizing the streaming?
Louis-Louise: Monetizing streaming was always on our mind, but we want to be mindful about what answering that question entails. A first and central point is that in my view, “paying when streaming” only starts to be a meaningful proposition once a certain scale of catalogue has been achieved. If you ask someone to pay a monthly amount to be divided between all the music they listen to, one way or another, a listener will want some guarantee that there’s enough music for them to discover and fall in love with that this amount is spread meaningfully to what they truly enjoyed. If there’s not enough catalogue, most listeners will feel like their money could have been spent more intelligently elsewhere as it would have been sent to artists they really wanted to support.
So to monetize streaming, we must first answer the complex question of how do we collectivize catalogue. The corporate streaming actors have “figured it out”, because it just takes the three major companies coming to an agreement, and then the rest of the independent industry will follow because it will almost be forced to. So the way to access a massive catalogue for the big streaming platforms is simpler if you have enough investment money to get there : cut a deal with the three giants, potentially another one with the biggest distribution services, and now Deezer, Qobuz, Tidal etc. all have access to the same catalogue and they can “monetize streaming” based on whatever the agreement was with the big corporate actors.
Since we’re talking about pivoting away from the corporate control of multi-billion dollar companies, we can’t start by “cutting a deal with them” which would effectively mean renouncing our control over this new network in parts or in totality, and we need to find a different way to build this “common catalogue”. I think figuring out “how to monetize streaming” starts there, not the other way around. Once we’ll have the baseline principles in place for that, we’ll be in a better position to also propose fairer systems to redistribute money to artists.
How do you facilitate music discovery?
Roberta: It is a question we frequently come back to, given the passivity of music discovery on many other music platforms and it is one that we are trying to expand upon all the time, but currently, we do have some degree of editorial, which isn’t influenced by PR or larger discovery channels that is literally just us finding a random page, genre or location and clicking on things across Mirlo, then sharing them to our audience when we find something that we think they’d like to hear. To make sure that this isn’t purely reflecting our own tastes as well, we open the floor every so often and ask our community what they’ve found on Mirlo or ask them to promote their own releases. We recently improved the search functionality on Mirlo, which has made it much easier to hop around different pages finding new music and to also discover labels and releases, with filtering for collections and wishlists too. As a musician too, I am always researching unconventional ways to discover music and I love unconventional things such as the ListenBrainz “explore” tab, which allows you to search by releases with similar colour schemes for their album cover and the more straightforward “neighbourhood” clusters, based on what people also listen to. Another thing we’ve talked about is context-based discovery and how to provide rich information about scenes grouped around a cause, location or genre that often get undervalued (or even just ignored altogether) on corporate platforms. We don’t have any concrete answers yet, but it’s been fun to do research around it and we welcome any input on this!
As a small project that leans heavily on volunteer work, part-time contributors with a variety of motivations, how do you approach planning and development so that you end up with a cohesive product? What are your main challenges and advice? (Asking for a friend)
Louis-Louise : First let’s precise that while the contributions are part time, the core team working on the project has been relatively stable and slowly growing, so there’s a sense of continuity that makes it easier to be coherent about the decisions that we’re making and where we’re going.
Apart from that, I would say one way to work on all of this is to think of it as a two headed project. The first part of it is the day to day work of managing and improving the platform : gathering and answering feedback, fixing bugs, gauging pain points, sometimes just talking to our users. In essence, figuring out “all the small things” that need to be adressed for Mirlo to be a usable, enjoyable experience that keeps improving and answering the actual needs of the people using it already.
The other part is bringing other platforms and actors into the conversation, while still using this day to day experience as datapoints to inform our vision of what to build next collectively and how to organize to grow this burgeonning network we’ve been discussing. So we’re building two things, one for the musician/listener relationship, the other for platform to platform relationships, and in a sense they both follow the same logic : Listen to feedback and experiences, try to establish pain points, try to answer needs where you feel your skill set is best suited to adress them, try to find other people for the things you’re not quite as good at.
In both cases the most important aspect is to remember why you’re doing things the way you are, and be real about both capacity and the reasoning behind your project. It’s why I’ve mentioned “listening” and “conversation” so much. Building a cohesive product isn’t just about UI/UX design, it’s also trying to figure out why we’re doing it in a first place and what it’s trying to fix.
Alex: When we decided to give Mirlo a go, the founding group took some time to agree on a few core principles. The last one is “We want to have fun along the way” and I have felt that has been a crucial north star for us as we’ve navigated this challenge. There’s a sort of magic that happens when each of us is having fun doing the part of building Mirlo that makes us happy. That’s not to say that this work is always fun; just that by making sure that we’re all finding our joy in the project we are tending to the overall cohesion simply by looking out for one another.
Mirlo asks Fairplayer
As a new organisation reconsidering the structure of music distribution, where/why do you think previous contenders in the music space have faltered?
Marcel: I think our novelty is try to tackle two complementary sides: first, a decentralized design in order to keep hosting costs low and to preserve artist’s sovereignty. On the other side, we are organizing local artists but also listeners in order to support musical creation. So, we have a combination of technical and social approach.
What does cooperation and decentralisation mean to you? How can we work with musicians to embrace this from a political standpoint instead of a purely technological one?
Guillem: Cooperation and decentralisation, often also integrated in the concept of federation, are healthy philosophies and practices even for those artists that don’t have a revolutionary or political vision. They let us experience the sharing of music in a calmer and more participatory way, regaining a sense of belonging. The exact opposite of the system that is now obfuscating us as artists and forcing us to compete within the attention economy, centralised in the big platforms.
We must cultivate face-to-face communities, and listen to and work with the ones that already exist, so they can participate in the digital ecosystem. I believe it is the only way to put to a side the technological point of view and build from a political point of view.
Are there any non-music projects that are doing great work right now that our music projects could learn from?
Marcel: Yes! Our territory has many cooperative projects that are well known to a large proportion of the catalan population. In the cultural field, we have La Directa, which is a journalism consumer cooperative. We are also deeply inspired by agroecological consumer cooperatives, where consumers organize to provide themselves with proximity and ecological food.
All these long lived projects show us that a cultural consumer-based sustainability is possible and suggest pathways to achieve it.
What do you think of the links made between streaming and passivity in the listening experience? How could we redefine this?
nico: More than there being a link, i believe passivity is a symptom of turning the experience of listening to music into engagement farming. Playlists, the key component of current streaming, capitalize our horror vacui the same way radio did, but without a clear human context such as a specific programme or DJ in so and so station. Instead, algorithmic curation gives us a musical cocktail so frictionless that it makes the music disappear as if it were the perfect sonic furniture for the current moment. For example, lofi beats to study, relax and chill.
This ramifies into the detachment of things that usually come with active listening: dissolving the need to find out more about that one song that caught your attention, or receiving recommendations from a friend or a magazine. Within the playlist mindset there’s no need for that, the machine investigates and recommends: you can just go about your day with some pleasant noise in the background so that you can isolate and just vibe, just chill. It also cheapens music as an artform, making it so that it becomes indistinguishable from muzak —a product designed for productivity and decoration.
Chill and its frictionlessness has been disastrous for listening habits. We’re constantly chasing a state of ataraxia or flow, perhaps to escape the existencial silence. For us, the solution is putting ourselves at risk of boredom: sitting down and doing nothing other than listening to a full album can be excruciatingly boring. After that, there’s a substrate for doing less boring music activities, such as leaving the house and talking shit about the boring album with your friends, or going to a concert. We aim to nurture that substrate by the way of community: streaming should align with facilitating the process of socializing listening.
Carles: to add to Nico’s very well expressed concerns, this has been a recurring topic in some of our conversations… how can we, in practical terms, encourage more “engaged listening” approaches. Sometimes I think maybe one way is to add some intentional friction to the process by explicitly avoiding algorithmic “infinite scroll” playlists. I personally like the concept of a mixtape: created “by hand” and impossible to edit once “given away”, with a hard limit on duration (I like the old 60m tape or 45m LP formats), curated with love and maybe someone in mind.
How is this project connected to the local scene? Have you learned any lessons from the recent groundswell of municipalist organizing in Barcelona or the Catalonian independence movement more broadly?
Marcel: This project is deeply connected to the local scene. In fact, it arises from it. Fairplayer is a project coordinated under a wider movement called “La Instrumental” (playing with “instrument” and “tool”, which is polysemic in catalan). Under this umbrella we can find the Spotify boycott of local artists and also the constitution of a listeners cooperative.
La Instrumental is composed of people that were already self-hosting fediversal tools, as well as free software activists. As you say, many of us learned lessons of self-organization in the independence movement but also of 15-M in 2011.
There are still some challenges regarding being more inclusive in terms of raciality and other diversities that are usually not that well connected to some cultural circuits.
Carles: we are lucky to live in a place with a lasting tradition of self-organization, associationism, cooperativism and militancy that goes a long way. This also includes things that one could consider “less political”, like amateur choirs, and organizations for the preservation of popular culture among others.
How do the musicians and software developers in your group work to communicate and make design decisions across those different areas of specialized knowledge??
Marcel: We are exploring several flows and tools. We are trying to keep a lot of presentiality in the project and many decisions are taken in regular meetings. As the teams are still small, it has worked pretty well.
However, to mantain asynchronous communication we are promoting the use of a forum to organize our discussions and a Delta Chat for ephemeral or logistical messages. This workflow has worked well in Fairplayer and we are exporting it to other sections of the movement.
Carles: as Marcel has mentioned, so far we’ve tried to leverage the privilege of having a hyperlocal team based in Barcelona and take advantage of in-person coworking opportunities (most of us live within a 30m public transport radius from the space where we typically meet). However, all of us being part-time volunteer contributors with limited availability makes this much more challenging than it would be in a “9-to-5” startup team, so we learn to navigate the challenges of asynchronicity.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/716