Help Mirlo Artists get to Nashville
Two years ago, when Mirlo was just being dreamed up, one of the first decisions we made about the group was that this project would be committed to working towards the values and vision outlined by the Solidarity Economy movement. As part of that commitment, we joined the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives as a startup member and sought advice from their seasoned crew of cooeprative developers as we took our first steps. One of those key early mentors was McKenzie Jones, a stalwart of the U.S. cooperative scene for many years and also a wonderful singer, songwriter, cellist, and co-founder of the rock band Strange Heavy.
So when McKenzie reached out to invite Alex to speak about cooperation in the music industry at Nashville's Americanafest, the response was an enthusiastic yes! The panel, entitled "Music Cooperatives: Reshaping the Industry Through Solidarity, Not Exploitation" will take place on Wednesday, September 10th and will feature Alex and McKenzie alongside musician-cooperators Olive Scibelli, who stewards the local independent venue DRKMTTR, and Sonia Erika of Death is a Business.
When the panelists first met up to discuss the panel and related logistics like sharing accommodations and coordinating a show that night at DRKMTTR, we turned into something like an ad-hoc mini-cooperative ourselves, brainstorming ways to pool resources and make sure that everyone could be there despite limited resources. As part of that effort, we decided to run a crowdfunding campaign to cover our collective costs—and Simon from the Mirlo team offered to build a prototype using Mirlo's code.
We're pretty excited to test this out because it puts forward something we've been tinkering with for a while. because Mirlo is built as a front-end agnostic server and anyone can build their own little projects based off of it. The Nashville Fundraiser is just an example of what that could look like: it's a static page (meaning, there's no user input) generated with NextJS, that uses the Mirlo API to fetch information from a artist account (in this case Alex's). We then sum together all sales for the account and show it towards a goal. When you make a purchase, you get taken to the artist's stripe page, and Mirlo treats it as a "tip". Let us know if you're interested in building something similar! The full code for the Nashville fundraiser page is here.
And in the meantime, please head over to the fundraiser page and help us get to Nashville! Every contribution is an important step towards helping us spread the word about worker cooperation in the music industry. We hope that this is the first of many opportunities to help musicians, labels, managers, and everyone else who makes music happen to learn about the benefits of cooperation.
Help Mirlo Artists get to Nashville
Thank you!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/367