This blog post is a condensation of a conversation we’ve recently had on the Fun Music Place Discord. We’re sharing it primarily to give some insight into our Discord community, the discussions that happen there, and some of the things we’re thinking about. Feel free to hop in and join the conversation!
Special thanks to Hakanto, Meljoann, and Chris Lowis for their contributions to the thoughts here.
Maintaining an internet presence—whether through a personal website or through a platform like Mirlo or Bandcamp—is a lot of work. For some musicians self-hosting (sharing and selling your music on your own website) is an option, and a world where self-hosting is the de facto solution was the promise of the original Internet. But it's crucial to recognize that having this time and acquiring the knowledge to do so is a luxury many musicians can not afford. A focus on self-hosting—without discussions of standardization (necessary for discovery and sharing of music) and a collective perspective—could continue to benefit the few over the many. It’s not an option for everyone, so we want to do more. As a collective we’re interested in defying existing extractive power structures and finding better ways for collective organization and cross-pollination of knowledge and craftsmanship.
If not everyone can self-host, hosting platforms must be accountable somehow to the musicians that use the platform while still valuing the labor put in by the people maintaining both the platform and the community it will necessarily generate. And while it’s less work to upload music to a platform, it is still work. By doing that work, musicians act as marketers for themselves, but also for the platform. Uploading music onto a platform that’s untested is work. Providing feedback to the maintainers of the platform is work. In many instances musicians are putting faith in these new platforms when there is no guarantee that they will be around in two years.
What is work?
What does it mean for someone to “work” on a platform? How is labor valued? It takes various types of work to make a platform a success; the label "worker" here can be misleading and just using it does not necessarily imply a sense of just compensation or attribution. Under capitalism to be a worker is to be actively disempowered. Bandcamp workers were laid off en masse when their company came under new ownership, despite their unionization efforts. On a platform, there are many different types of work people can engage in to contribute. Recognizing the work done to make any project a success is critical to the project of worker self-management and control. For a platform that strives to be both fair to its maintainers and its users, how do you group the folks with the same types and levels of contributions together so that they—the folks with the knowledge of their experience—can represent their interests well and take care of each other?
How other platforms value work
Both Resonate and Ampled were structured as multi-stakeholder cooperatives. This means that—under ideal circumstances—there would be three groups of platform “owners”. For both co-ops this was musicians, listeners, and workers. Each stakeholder group would be able to nominate and vote for board members, and each group would occupy one third of the board seats. At both co-ops, you could buy a listener membership, be a worker owner through doing labor on the platform, or create a musician profile on the platform and use it as a creator (you needed to have uploaded music to Resonate or have over 10 subscribers on Ampled). However, for various reasons, Resonate never reached this stage of its governance structure, and Ampled was only able to try it out for 2 years.
Artisans Cooperative takes a slightly different approach. With their points and tiers system they hope to value all contributions by all co-op members (artisans, workers, and supporters) equally. They let people contribute through work or cash to allow for various levels of entry into the co-op, and redistribute profits based on tiers of contributions, rather than a set member class. At Comradery there is no distinction made between creators and worker owners. More like a mutual aid group or rank-and-file union, everyone who is considered a worker is expected to contribute for a couple of hours a week.
The work in running a platform that is accountable to the community
As has been witnessed in other multi-stakeholder workplaces, worker-owners will end up being the facilitators for the participation of other ownership/membership classes. For every musician-owner or listener-owner who gains governance rights, this not only adds to the complexity of the governance system, it adds to the workload of the worker-owners who are expected to manage those governance processes: tallying votes, organizing meetings, and so much more. A very robust self-managing worker-owner group is probably a prerequisite to establishing other governance classes like musician-owners, etc—particularly in an online co-op where membership numbers could change dramatically and rapidly.
Rights must be paired with responsibilities, because if you lump together people with the same rights but very different levels of responsibility in the same governance unit, the folks with the most responsibility will—in our experience—burn out and quietly or loudly quit. If you set the bar for ownership and governance rights low, then you might end up with lots of people that the system treats as owners but who don't have any responsibilities. This is often done with the goal of increasing the number of people who have governance rights.
However, in some instances, those who are trying to act democratically are unable to get their needs met. This tendency occurs for a variety of reasons such as workers being disempowered or subverted, or demands being made of them that can’t be fulfilled within given constraints.
Accountability of the platform to the community
There is—whether rightful or misplaced—distrust from musicians and other creators for new platforms like Mirlo. The past has a record of failures in this space. Lack of funding, lack of organizational culture, disagreements on visions that couldn't be sorted out through a sound decision making system, problems in maintaining transparency through the work-chain, all of this made it so that despite the structure guaranteeing x or y to all stakeholders, they couldn't actually pull it off. When people are used to venture capital financed tech, can smaller collectives really make a dent? Can they compete with larger platforms?
One of the questions we’ve been struggling with at Mirlo, and something that deserves its own blog post, is the push and pull between the technical needs of a platform and the community we’re building that realizes tech won’t fix the problems we face. The tool we’re building makes sense to us as an immediate need for the musicians in our circles, but if we’re interested in distributing power, encouraging mutuality, and putting the tool in the hands of the community, we need to change how we relate to each other.
Co-ops are not magical. They’re made up of people who are trying to make decisions under less than ideal circumstances. While they open up space for creativity, we should not consider them the be-all and end-all of the conversation. The problems we face are structural and massive.
These are all things we’re considering in Mirlo as we draft our operating agreements and work our way to building a community we can exit to. We’re working closely with our existing community—actively reaching out and growing it beyond the demographics already heavily invested in the space—to build a better understanding of this work and we want to encourage you to get involved. As with all attempts to resist the systems—capitalism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, ableism, etc—that take advantage of us, we need to work together to figure these things out. Talking to each other, building affinity, clarifying our collective values, and evolving our agreements over time as we consider their limits and failures will move us closer to these aims. At Mirlo, we’ll continue trying to figure out the best way to earn the trust of our community. As we formulate our operating agreement and envision our exit to community—our plan to bring the community surrounding Mirlo formally into decision making processes—we’re hoping for an iterative process that grows and transforms over time as we learn with our community.
Interested in learning more? Schedule some time during our office hours, hop on our discord, or join us for an upcoming community call. Want to help us figure it out? Support us with a monthly contribution or hop on our discord to get involved!
Listening to
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/post/26