For the next 6 months, the worker owners of Mirlo proposed to take a 7% cut of transactions conducted on the platform (on top of the percentage taken by our payment processor Stripe).
Here’s what our process looked like:
This blog post was circulated on our discord server (as a google draft, as well as just an initial outline, we’re publishing it now!) .
We launched a Murmur vote to garner community member’s feedback on the proposal
Once the feedback time period concluded, worker members voted on the proposal
We will be re-evaluating this percentage in 6 months. It might go up, or go down, depending on the co-op’s finances, and conversations we have with musicians who use the platform
Here are the things we took into consideration for this percentage
While we're in a beta mode it makes sense to incentive artists to put music on our platform
We want to make sure that there is an expectation of supporting the platform from musicians
We want to make sure workers can make time for working on the platform, and that looks like much more than just contributing code
Keeping in mind the history of bandcamp friday and how it gets used by artists to maximize their sales on those days
We want to be considerate of other platforms and their funding sources and avoid a race to the bottom dynamic
This is one dial of many we can turn
We're at a rate of transactions where the amount of sales on our platform will have very little material impact on how we're funded or how we support the platform. We'd need to have about 2000 dollars a month moving through the platform to even be able to support just server costs at a 15% cut rate. For this reason we're mainly going to pursue a crowdfunding direction
When looking at services that allow sellers to set their own take rate (eg. itch.io), the average on these services comes out to 7%.
This was consensus but not everyone's most ideal percentage. Some of us voiced a preference for 15% (it's easier to turn the number down than it is to turn it up) while others voiced a preference for 5% or even 0% (it's not a feasible source of income at this point anyway).
Over the next few days we’ll be adjusting the take rate on the website to reflect this decision.
Bonus content:
Income projections
Here’s a table that shows some basic math comparing the different possible take rates considered, the amount in dollars moving through the platform, and what that means for Mirlo’s funding. Beneath it is a table that shows the amount of direct supporters we would need to reach similar amounts of income.
Artist Subscriptions | Average Mirlo Percent | |||
Total Throughput $ | 5% | 7% | 10% | 15% |
$100 | $5 | $7 | $10 | $15 |
$500 | $25 | $35 | $50 | $75 |
$1,000 | $50 | $70 | $100 | $150 |
$2,000 | $100 | $140 | $200 | $300 |
$10,000 | $500 | $700 | $1,000 | $1,500 |
$100,000 | $5,000 | $7,000 | $10,000 | $15,000 |
Average Supporter Tier | ||||||
Mirlo Direct Supporters # | $5 | $10 | $15 | $20 | $50 | $100 |
25 | $125 | $250 | $375 | $500 | $1,250 | $2,500 |
50 | $250 | $500 | $750 | $1,000 | $2,500 | $5,000 |
100 | $500 | $1,000 | $1,500 | $2,000 | $5,000 | $10,000 |
Current costs
It's not cheap to run Mirlo! It turns out that even with just 75 releases on the platform (!!!) when folks upload 500mb+ flac files for our servers to process, we need decent server memory, processing power, and storage space. We’ve bumped our servers a couple of times in the past month, and our next bill (hopefully it’ll stay steady for a while) is looking to clock in at about $150 a month. Currently, we’re receiving about $70 a month through our platform support.
On top of this are costs around outreach, lawyers, membership in various organizations, tools that we use like Zoom, etc. And we haven’t even talked about the labor costs!
If you want a project like Mirlo to be successful please consider supporting us!
Listening to
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/post/16