We operate in an incredibly creative space. For at least the past decade, people have been trying to build alternatives to the existing music economy. As a community, we're throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks. Subvert's Corporation + Co-op model, Artist Corporations, B-corps, multi stakeholder co-operatives, and worker co-operatives: all are trying to fix the same issue: making it so that musicians can feed themselves. What we've learned over the past half decade of doing this work is that so much of it is rooted in sustainability, appropriate growth, and how we relate to each other.
At Mirlo we're being mindful about how we grow. We're building our relationships slowly, bringing more people into the work, celebrating victories, and analyzing gaps in our understanding. To that end we have some very exciting announcements just beyond the horizon.
And, as always, we're committed to transparency about our financial situation, so that others can understand what things are looking like, and how we're making decisions.
Profit & Loss Q2, 2025
This quarter we earned $1,154.52 in direct monthly support, and a total of $142.01 from platform fees. We spent primarily $936.40 on buying t-shirts from Worx Printing, which was expensive, but also exciting, because it marks a milestone on a t-shirt design and our Kickstarter fulfillment (the shirts were a reward tier with which we raised 15k from the community almost a year ago!). They look so good!
Of course, as usual, our large costs come in the form of operating expenses. We spent a bunch of money on business registration costs, hosting our platform, and organization tools. If this was our usual budget, we'd be coming in ahead on our expenses versus our income. However, this quarter we did two really exciting things!
The first is that we brought on a user experience researcher to help us do in depth interviews with musicians to better understand how independent musicians navigate the world, what they look for in their digital presences, and what the joys and struggles from their music making. We're looking forward to sharing insights from this work soon. Paying stipends and our designer made up roughly $3400, funded largely by investments from our worker owners and a grant to do research by Wellesley College. If you want to help fund this kind of research, consider pitching in with a monthly gift.
Second, together with the Kiazii Collective, we helped host an in-person event in Washington, DC called the Music Movement. The event brought together people from the music world and the solidarity economy to network, discuss alternatives, and listen to music. Videos from the event have already been published on social media, and we're working on a retrospective to share on our blog. The event was funded by a generous grant from the Greater Washington Center for Employee Ownership. We would love to organize more events like this—if you'd like to organize something in your community, reach out!
We ended the quarter with $582.96 in the bank account. Honestly, that's not that much. And it takes a lot of work from a lot of people to keep Mirlo running. Any amount you can throw our way helps.
Some small product updates
We've made some discoverability improvements, the main one is that you can browse all tags on the platform. Are you as excited about neo-tribal-folk-noise-synesthesia as I am? You can now also browse releases by their license. Looking for something in the public domain? Or something that's licensed as creative commons? Got you. We're also constantly making improvements all over the site, fixing bugs, and working on accessibility and usability.
Want to help test our under-development mobile app? Or trial run our label functionality? Shoot us an email at hi@mirlo.space.
Cover image by BenjiTunez
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/337