I want to underscore these two points.
Note: We’re working on a slightly more thought through version of what I’m about to write, and it’s been hard for me to keep up with how quickly these threads move and track the tangents (you can fork threads by the way, and reply in different threads if you want to go off topic).
When we started building Mirlo, there wasn’t anyone else out there doing the same thing! We were involved in Resonate and Ampled, and were fairly familiar with the landscapes at the time. Then Bandcamp sold a second time and suddenly we felt a need to move quickly to capitalize on that moment, and at the same time Ampwall was announced, then we found out about Jam.coop, Tone.audio, Faircamp, and then in October Austin announced Subvert (which now has 5k members, btw). So now it’s actually a fairly crowded field, and there’s a bit of overlap! One of the reasons we personally went with a bandcamp clone–our decision preceded the sales and union busting–was that bandcamp is a profitable business (unlike Spotify and other streaming apps), so we saw it as possible to carve out a little space where we could actually build an income from and support the work on the project. Originally we actually wanted to pivot Resonate in that direction, and even passed a vote to do so, but there were interpersonal / political / burn out things that basically blocked that (underscoring to us the importance of figuring out governance structure, but also financial support).
However, we’ve been thinking a lot about whether “a global marketplace where individual musicians compete with each other for very little dollars from their fans” is actually the direction we think the music industry we’d like to see going in. I personally struggle with the sense of ownership and sunk cost I feel with the current Mirlo platform, and whether it makes sense to actually continue building it out with so many alternatives in place, especially as no one is getting paid to do this work (I’m spending a lot of personal money doing this work).
But so I think there’s some questions of what it is we do want to build! Is a more social space like soundcloud something we want? What can we tear out of the existing code bases to do new things with? How can we build on other open software (eg. Open Collective) to build musician collectives? How can those things we build be sustainable for the people working on them?
To get back to the topic–something we’ve been tinkering with the idea of–we have a person who’s been in their free time building a mobile app for Mirlo–is that a mobile first experience could be more social based, basically using a different set of databases to store interactions, but to send money to musicians based on a you choose your monthly subscription (user centric payout model).