It Could Happen Here - The Co-op Trying to Change the Music Industry

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Mia talks with Simon and Alex, two co-founders and worker owners of the music co-op platform Mirlo, about how streaming changed the music industry and how to fix it. https://mirlo.space https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirloSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Call Zone Media It could happen here. That's the podcast that you're listening to. I'm your host, Mia Wong. It's a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. This is a very, very immediate falling apart and then trying to put it back together again

episode. Today, we are talking about something we haven't really talked about on the show very much, which is the music industry and the absolute fiasco that is streaming services within it. And here to talk with me today are two people who are trying to fix some of those problems. And those two people are Simon and Alex, who are co-founders and worker owners of a new platform project initiative, many such words called Mirlo. And yeah, both of you two, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah. Excited to be on here. Yeah. So I'm excited to talk with you both first about sort of the issues with the existing sort of market for music distribution, because there's been over the last really 20 years there's been a sort of seismic shift in how music distribution has functioned from a model that was previously largely built on things like record sales to the sort of streaming platform so yeah can you talk about what the issues you see with the sort of current model are and how that kind of led you to do something different sure yeah i mean for me that's the story of current model are and how that kind of led you to do something different? Sure. Yeah. I mean, for me, that's the story of me growing up with music, you know, because I was born in the 1980s. So, you know, my first connection to, you know, to music was through

playing in my elementary school band, learning the trumpet and then the trombone, but also, you know, beginning to buy CDs. And I remember, I think it might've been Will Smith's Big Willie style or whatever that like in the early nineties, I think was the first CD that I bought. But, you know, that was how I, you know, music came into my world. There were also some cassette tapes too. I think like when I was younger, it was cassette tapes. Then by the time I was the one, like, you know, spending my allowance money, it was CDs. But then, you know, by the end of the decade, by the time I'm in high school, you know, Napster happens. I was, I think in middle school when that happened. So we should explain what Napster is because I think we've now reached the point where

it's faded into legend. Napster was a big deal because all of a sudden I can speak from my, you know, memory of it as a 12 year old or whatever. I was probably 14 maybe when Napster was a thing. I remember going over to my neighbor's house who I hung out with after school a lot. And he had this program on his computer where he could download any song that he wanted. And it was just like this incredible, mind-blowing new thing. Of course, that's just from the end point of the distribution, right? That's from that perspective. It was this absolutely transformative experience. But of course, all of the steps that got into getting the music there was putting some carts before some horses, you know, and a lot of it was,

you know, getting there via unauthorized leaks or other ways that because it was all of a sudden so simple to share the physical sounds through the new kinds of media channels that were available through the internet, obviously, and through software, the folks at Napster were able to really jump ahead of that and in classic Silicon Valley fashion, you know, disrupt the industry. And all of that was really happening with musicians early on, right? This was even before the dot-com bubble burst, you know, Napster was riding that wave and a big part of that sort of first arrival of Silicon Valley startup technology really arriving in millions of, you know, living rooms and home office computers and, you know, all that. And so I think historically, you know,

with technology, this really does play out that oftentimes musicians are the ones that get disrupted first. And for decades, this has been, you can look at the history of the 20th century and the history of media in the 20th century as this tension between musicians doing what they do and technologists doing what they do and capitalists using the technology to extract value from the musicians, you know? And then there have, of course, been lots of ways

that musicians have organized and fought back and, you know, wrote their own chapters in the story. And I think that we're just just starting to get to the point where that is happening in this latest episode. Napster is, you know, 25 years old at this point in terms of when that that moment happened. And of course, the reaction to Napster from the entrenched music industry, which were all consolidating under these massive media conglomerates at that time, they fought back kind of old school. And I remember I was in college when they were suing college kids for downloading stuff on Napster for having files on your computer that, you know, weren't authorized or whatever. Those were my

peers, you know, I didn't actually know anybody personally that this was happening to, but this was, you know, this was something that we were all aware of and we were all kind of figuring out together. There's a really good Cory Doctorow book. That's like a fictionalized account of what this period was like called pirate cinema. That is great. So if you ever want to, yeah, if people want to read that, it is very good. It's about the sort of film version of the same fight that was happening. Exactly. And they were, I mean, no holds barred. Like they had massive budgets for expensive lawyers and they just sent them after whoever they could thinking that that would stem the tide. And obviously, that wasn't going to stop anything because what Napster signaled was this massive technologically catalyzed paradigm shift where the way that people listen to music was just radically transforming before everyone's eyes.

And it took the music industry side of it a little while to catch up to that reality. But once they did, they started trying to figure out, okay, what are the ways that we can get a cut? Obviously, if everyone's just doing this illegally, and this is just if everybody is doing something illegal at the same time, even we can't send enough lawyers to sue everybody out of existence. So we need to figure out how to make this work. And that's when there started to be experiments with other big corporate players in the technology industry. I remember from my perspective, it was the iTunes store. I remember ripping all of my CDs that I bought in high school, like spending a whole weekend, just ripping them all into my iTunes library and kind of curating it and having my, you know, all of my MP3s in iTunes and I had an iPod and that was where I listened to things. And I didn't even really purchase a lot of the,

like, cause they had 99 cent tracks. That was kind of the thing was like, you could pay a dollar and you can get what you wanted. I didn't buy that much music by that point. Cause mostly it was transferring files that I had burned from CDs. But that was how the industry was kind of making its peace with this disruption was to partner with Apple. And then later, Spotify comes onto the scene with this promise of the universal jukebox, right? Like we're going to build the tool that is going to allow for any listener to just pay a subscription and they can listen to anything they want on the internet because you can pirate anything on the internet we're going to make the

legal way to do it and so we're going to let people pay and we're going to design all of the back end we're going to centralize it in our you know technological systems and we're going to build this tool that can allow anybody to listen to music anytime without having to in the back of their mind, be worried about if they're stealing from a musician or if, you know, they're going to get sued by their record label or whatever. Right. So, and of course the record companies were all in on that bet. And, and that is where, you know, there, I haven't seen all of the books or whatnot, but it's very clear that, you know, the major labels

were big, you know, equity owners in Spotify. So they're basically making big bets on Spotify. And then the tension that has been navigated is, okay, how do they maintain the value of the catalog, the back catalog, the intellectual property rights of all of the recordings that throughout, you know, the history of recorded music, they have consolidated into these, you know, catalog portfolios of sounds and songs. So that's valuable and they need to get their piece from that. But then they also need to get their piece from Spotify, the business, you know, continuing to exist and that subscriber revenue from people who are paying for the privilege to be able to listen to any song that they want at the click of a button.

And that has, yeah, it's created some weird incentives, particularly the group of people at the end of the day that really gets left out of that are the musicians. Because throughout history, you know, the partnerships with people who distribute music have been very exploitative, right? It's like, okay, I'll give you an advance to go record your music, give you all this creative control, you know, set up the studio time, do all the legwork to make it so you can do whatever you want as a musician. But then we're keeping the master recordings, you know, we're keeping a percentage of every sale that you make. So it does become this kind of deal where the labels over the longer term benefit much,

much more than the musicians. And then the deal with Spotify really amplified that because the labels are making sure they get their cut, but they're not always making sure that the musicians get their cut. And even the musicians getting their cut has to go through the labels first. And so the labels have this relationship with the technology company that's distributing the files themselves. And that's kind of the bargain where it stayed, right? And then most recently, that became even more amplified.

It sort of turned up the volume on the disparity in this dynamic when Spotify made the decision to demonetize many of the songs that are on the platform. So it used to be that you would get some fraction of a cent for every time that someone streamed your song. And Spotify had this complex algorithm for determining how you got paid out. And they recently tweaked that algorithm so that if you don't meet a certain threshold of plays, you don't get anything. So you could have your music on Spotify,

it could be music that you worked really hard and even invested your own time and money and resources into putting out there and you don't get a penny of it and you don't get to say in why. and that's the starting point from a musician's perspective about where things are at i think it's also interesting to think about how the way those technology systems and the way that the music distribution has changed has also changed the way that music gets made. So you see a lot more, you know, very big name musicians releasing single tracks

to big acclaim because now the incentive and with the tweaking of the incentive is that you want individual tracks that are making millions and millions of plays. So it really becomes about that rather than and you know that can be fairly value neutral you know album versus track or whatever but it is really influencing the way that you know the first 20 seconds or so of a song are the most important so the structure of songs are changing to suit you know what what actual music gets made. Because people skip the song, then it doesn't make any money.

And yeah, so the way that the technology and capital and the incentives of capital have changed to actually shape the culture that we're consuming, I think it's very interesting. Yeah. And speaking of the way that capital and capital incentives changes the structure of what you're consuming. We need to take an ad break. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series,

Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. And we are back. So I think one of the kind of bleak things about this kind of era of media distribution

has been how kind of staggeringly impossible it's felt to resist any of these forces, largely because, you know, now you have the power effectively of these massive tech companies and then also the power of the sort of existing sort of studio monopolies on the same side sort of wielding a giant hammer and like hammering everyone else in the line and this is the point where i want to ask yeah start talking about what mirlo is so can we talk a little bit about i guess first how it got started and then we can get more into what is it and how it's attempting to change all of this

So about two years ago now, wow, I was doing a lot of volunteering with a project called Resonate, which is a little bit of a precursor to Mirlo in a way. Resonate is trying to be an alternative to Spotify. They want to be a streaming service where you can basically just create playlists, listen to music. And what was novel about Resonate was that they had a payout structure where every time you played a stream, you paid a little bit more. So if you pay once, you pay a cent. If you play twice, you pay two cents. And then it would increase to paying around a dollar. And once you paid a dollar for a track, so you played it like nine times, you pay $0.02. And then it would increase to paying around $1. And once you paid $1 for a track, so you played it like nine times, you owned the track. And then it was yours to pay for indefinitely.

That was cool. I did some work there. But what became apparent quickly was, again, these incentive structures where if you want to do a streaming platform, you want it to be a universal jukebox. People will use it for the music that's on it and they want to hear the music that they know. And if you want to be a universal jukebox, you have to wade into the realm of royalties. And one of the things that we didn't mention earlier is that, as far as I know, maybe it has changed in the past year or so, Spotify is still not profitable. Despite massive

payouts to the CEO, Spotify doesn't actually turn a profit. It's just investment driven. And that is in large part because of the way that royalties work on songs. It's just really hard to actually make money on top of all the costs of the infrastructure, which was a little bit of a clue for us for it not working for a bootstrapped, non-VC funded worker co-op with absolutely no money, it was unlikely that that would succeed. We started also looking at projects that are kind of in the same space and were a little bit more successful. That's how we got into contact with Alex. And Alex, I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about Ampled. Sure. Yeah. So Sai mentioned that he was coming out of Resonate. At the same time, I was coming out of Ampled, which was a platform cooperative initiative that was started later part of the create essentially a monthly patronage kind of platform for musicians. So you release exclusive stuff on the platform that's yours and that you have the intellectual property rights to. rights to, and you have supporters who pay a monthly contribution to have access to that content. And so they had a little, I guess it was kind of like a blog post kind of format that could, you could embed audio, you could embed videos, and it would go out in an email to your

supporters every month. And they could log into the platform to listen to your whatever you're releasing there. I joined Ampled because I was actually at the time coming out of some other work that I had been doing and building democratic workplaces. I had been involved in starting another project that was trying to organize itself that way and was also working with my partner who's a therapist to start a mental health worker cooperative at the same time. So I was deep in the worker cooperative nerd zone at that point, but I had not been playing very much music. I'm a trombonist and do jazz and improvised music and had taken a couple of years off really from playing and was starting to get cranky. There's just a part of me that needs to make music.

That's just the part of who I am. And it was just becoming really clear to me that that needed to happen. So I was starting to look for what are some ways that I can start putting some stuff out into the world again. And ideally doing that work in the spirit of cooperation, you know, and finding other people who shared my enthusiasm for the idea that doing the work together and learning how to actually run things cooperatively without, you know, a management structure on top of it, siphoning energy away from it. And so I found Ample on the internet and saw what the proposition was. And part of their structure

at the time was that you could actually become a co-owner of the platform by being an artist that was using the platform. And once you got to a certain number of supporters on the platform, then you got to be, well, the governance rights involved being able to, a third of the board members, it was a nine-person board with three artists representatives could run for the board. And there was also sort of an extra space in their discord that was sort of artist owner, you know, only kind of space to connect around that. And so, yeah, once I got the number of people following my project, this was in 2022, got an email saying, congratulations, you're an artist owner. And at the same time, realized that the party was kind of over. I had, when I arrived into the space, I was like, hey, everybody, what's up?

And it was just kind of crickets, you know? And there were a couple of the workers who were working on it at the time who I'm pretty sure were still volunteering their time, who I'd had some conversations with and gotten to know a little bit, but it was sort of a ghost ship by that point. And it turns out I was the last artist owner to join. Oh no. Dubious distinction. Exactly. The platform wound down entirely at the end of 2023. And so, yeah, it was maybe a few months after I had joined and started using it. I kind of had a monthly flow where I would do something, send an update, write something about what I was working on, record some trombone sounds, you know, link to something else that was

on the internet, you know. And so after a few months of doing that, yeah, I got an email saying we're winding down. Sorry. And that was kind of that. But by that point, I had met Sai. And we were both kind of starting to compare notes about these respective projects that had similar goals, similar ideals, similar interest in, you know, cooperating and realizing that neither of them was, you know, was going to be a place where we could continue the work that we wanted to do. And so we started talking about, well, what if we were going to start from scratch, what would that look like? And Cy brought some other friends he'd been working with at Resonate. And these conversations, we just started as conversations,

like similar to the one we're having right now, where we're starting to kind of develop an analysis together about what was going on in the music industry, what might be able to be done differently.

And after a few months, those conversations started turning into, wait, yeah, we could actually do some of this ourselves. And that was when the idea of Merlot really started to hit the ground. Yeah, we will talk more about

how all of this sort of came together and what the structure looks like and what it will look like after more of these ads. Max, you might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens.

So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God,

things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. We are back. So, all right, let's get into the sort of meat of what Merlot is. So can you talk about what is sort of different about Merlot than the other sort of platforms in the market? How is the cooperative structure work? Yeah, so when we were looking at ways to actually make a profitable business,

which is unfortunately a thing that you have to do if you want to, or at least a revenue making business, if you want to be able to pay people. We were looking at other platforms and spaces that exist out there that do actually make money. So Patreon and Bandcamp have been profitable. Bandcamp for a long time actually posted their earnings as a report. Then Bandcamp got sold and then it got sold again. And then Bandcamp laid off half of their staff, including everyone who was part of the union organizing committee. And we were already like, we already had a basically a prototype at that point. But that was also a moment where we realized it was like, oh, we got to go.

We got to press go on this thing. And so what we have, what the product is right now is basically, it is, I would say, a lightweight clone of Bandcamp. It doesn't have all the functionality with the added features of more Patreon style subscription based things. So musicians can go onto Murillo, they upload their albums, they can sell their albums as digital copies for whatever they want for free or for money. And then they can also set subscription tiers, use it as a mailing list, basically to send out updates to subscribers, have specific tiers that receive specific content. For example, you could have a tier that if someone subscribes, they automatically get a new release that you put

on the platform. And yeah, that's basically the product. It allows music playing, but it's not a streaming service. You can't make playlists. It allows music playing, but it's not a streaming service. You can't make playlists. It doesn't do infinite streaming. The plays are basically promotional plays. So we've had 250 artists, which includes some people who work under several names. But so 250 entities, artists who have uploaded 500 albums to Irlo which i don't know i haven't done the math on what that is like listening time wise but it's probably already more music that i could consume and we have people buying music um it's really exciting you know like it's not we're not we're not making enough money to to bankroll anything but uh it's exciting that i think we've got about

400 moving through the platform every month at this point. So that's really cool. We need more, obviously, but that goes a long way to, you know, I guess, confirming the ideas that we've had so far. And there was a second part of that question. How does the sort of cooperative structure work now? And then we could move on to what is it going to look like when the platform is sort of more developed, more mature? Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. So we also, in our thinking about this, took a lot of lessons from our experiences in Amplified and Resonate, also the other experiences I've had in, you know, cooperative organizing structures. And one of the things that we wanted to make sure we did was we had kind of a phase one.

And then during that phase one, also kind of figure out the vision for what we want to see moving forward and how we can grow into something that's more like what we ultimately want. In other words, we didn't want to put the cart before the horse and saying like, okay, let's draw out like this really spiffy multi-stakeholder cooperative thing where the artists have these things and the, you know, listeners have these things and the coders have, you know, for starters, we just figured out who among us is like ready to,

our government name on a piece of paper and, you know, open an LLC. And that ended up being three of us who are based in the United States, me, Sai, and one other work on our Jody. And then from there, the three of us were kind of the core team that is going to build things out from here. So we're still very early stages. You know, the soft launch, the platform was the beginning of this year, just a couple months ago. We incorporated last year in November. So all of this is totally brand new. And, you know, we're figuring out as we go.

But the idea with the current group is that we start to practice a culture of decision-making by consent. And that's this idea that particularly anything high level about, you know, what the business is or how it runs is consented to by everybody in the group. And so if there's anything that any of us are a no to, you know, we're like, hold up, this isn't going to work for me. That actually is the way that we steer the ship forward. So that's been something that we've been working on building together. We're working with a legal team to codify this into sort of worker cooperative style, LLC operating agreement. We, you know, we're members of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. We've been kind of learning from the ecosystem of ways that worker cooperative policies and

procedures can be built into the nucleus of this at the beginning. And also the three of us each come from different places. And so we each bring really different perspectives to where things need to go. And so that's also been a part of, you know, where we're starting from is if we can get enough unique perspectives into the space to build the core, practice this culture of consent where even a minority of no is a no for the whole group and start to build that in, then that is kind of the seed for where things go from here. In terms of where things go from here, one of the things that you talk about a lot is the exit to community. And yeah, I wanted to ask, can you explain what that is and what it sort of means for what this platform is going to be going forward? Yeah. So this idea of exit to community comes from conversations that have been happening

in the solidarity economy world about what would it look like to support essentially startup businesses, right? That the founders are aiming for a different kind of exit than how we traditionally think about, you know, startup businesses that are aiming for an exit to either get bought by a bigger company or get listed publicly on a stock market and become essentially instruments of financial speculation. And that's really the only kind of pathway out. We even saw this with Bandcamp that, you know, this company that was internally profitable and doing things the way that regular old business is supposed to operate, you know, and releasing their financials every year and, you know, really doing it by the book, so to speak there, the end point, you know, 10 ish years down the road was getting bought by

a bigger company because what they had built was valuable to Epic Games. And there's been speculation about why Epic bought Bandcamp. But whatever the reason was, it wasn't because they were ticking all the boxes as a profitable business every step of the way. That might have been part of it. But the idea was that Bandcamp had become something more valuable and that they could cash out. You know, I think it was 280 something million dollars, which is a big chunk of change. And that, you know, the decision to cash out was made by the founder. There was likely other people who had input into the decision, but there certainly wasn't, you know, a team that was, you know, having a deliberation and making a consent based decision about how to do that. It was one guy and he signed the paperwork and that was having a deliberation and making a consent-based decision about how to do

that. It was one guy and he signed the paperwork and that was it. So the idea of exit to community has essentially been an invitation to explore alternatives, alternatives that are more in alignment with building a world that we're actually trying to see. So for us, that means, you know, first of all, creating something that is financially viable, you know, that can actually support the work that it takes to both maintain the platform and maintain accountability to the people who are using the platform, particularly the musicians, so that those relationships need to get built. There needs to be enough trust in order to feel like this is actually a thing worth

continuing to do together. And then there's also the work of having it be essentially used enough that the math works out, that the work that it takes to sustain the platform can be supported, and the work that it takes to make music can be supported. Because ultimately, this is a platform that is trying to move money into musicians' pockets. So if we can pull that off, then the next step is the exit to community step, which the way I see it would be essentially co-designing a set of agreements about how the system will continue to be tended to moving forward in ways that are directly accountable to the people who are involved in, you know, making it go themselves. Right. So in this case, you know, we see the community as kind of broadly comprised of three different groups, not like groups of people that all hang out together and do stuff together, but like there's kind of three kinds of contributions that are getting made.

One is the people who are working on developing the software. This is an open source software project. So there's been a lot of inputs from a lot of different people of that. Of course, the work of maintaining an open source software project requires resourcing. But that's one of the groups. Another group is the musicians, the people who are, you know, making stuff that they put on the platform. And another is the people who are listening and the people who are supporting with, you know, with patronage, with money, right? And

some people might be in all three of those categories, you know, so it's not like there's your one or the other, but those three things all have really important, an important stake in the sustainability of the overall operations. So the exit to community step would be essentially designing standards, protocols, agreements, whatever you want to call it for how we do this work moving forward. And then we can get out of the way if we want, you know, so that's the other part of it. The other part of it too, of an exit is how do you make sure that the founders are whole, you know, so that it's not like we've put all this work into making something possible and then it's working and then everyone's like, oh yeah, screw you. Get out of here. We're ready to take

this on our own. We're hoping that doesn't happen either. So figuring out that is also part of what's before us. My aspiration and my vision for this is that culture of consent that we're baking into the worker stage of this right now can be something that continues to be a core aspect of how we move forward. In other words, once we really see who all the stakeholders are, let's come up with a creative way to figure out how all this is going to work that everybody can consent to. I think that's a good place to transition to the last thing I wanted to ask, which is, you know, you've both came from projects that kind of fizzled. And this is the thing that happens a lot of time with projects like this so what what is the sort of plan to make sure that this is not like the next in a pile of of people who tried to do this that didn't work we've been having a lot of conversations around that because there have been like public

reflections happening about the final years of ample so there's some reflections around those things that you can find those on the internet. Well, so the things I'm thinking about is you really have to think about what it means to be successful. And it's possible to claim that success is, you know, we go toe to toe with Bandcamp or Patreon, and we beat them at the game of being a VC-funded startup, but we do it with volunteer and grassroots money support. And I guess that is a way of thinking of success. It's not my personal way of thinking of success.

So a way of thinking of success for me is more, what's the end result? What are we hoping to do? What are we hoping to prefigure? Is it a more resilient community of people who are willing to go into a next step together? And in that way, I feel like you could say that Resonate and Ampled, they fizzled, but they both created spaces where people found each other and tried to do the next thing. And I feel like that is very much the project of organizing prior to, you know, global socialism or whatever, is looking at what we did and learning from it and moving forward and trying again, because we have to try again. And I feel like that is kind of the big picture question. We have some stuff in place that we're doing to make our projects a bit more resilient.

The consent stuff is part of that, that Alex just described. Other parts of that is that we, from the get-go, decided to do things publicly and bring in people as quickly as possible. I was the original programmer for the platform, but in the past month, I have been honestly one of the smallest contributors contributors to the platform we've just had people stepping up in really incredible ways um truly appreciate it we've had people stepping in during this campaign they've been making videos they've been making art yeah just the way that the community is stepping in and like wanting to be a success i I think is this great example of what it is we can achieve if we're willing to let people into the process of doing that. There are a lot of

questions there about who and what is doing that supporting. So that is something that we're constantly checking in on. And I think also a metric of success is who is interacting with the platform, especially at Resonate. They did a really good job of bringing in the folks from Black Socialists of America standard, I don't know, like open source tech people to open up through cultural work, through conversations that are very local focused to create space where we're talking about these things. Yeah. And I think for me, the idea of success too has to do with our needs getting met, you know, because Spotify is not meeting people's needs. Sorry. It's just not, I mean, I guess it's meeting some people's needs,

not meeting very many people. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they just fired like, not literally their entire podcasting division, but an unbelievably large number of extremely talented people got fired. Oh, really? And it, yeah, it really sucks. That's really interesting. Yeah, it really sucks. That's really interesting. Yeah. You know, not operating at the same scale that Spotify is, actually making it work matters, you know?

And my hope is that, first of all, the individual artists start to see this as a place that, you know, they can kind of get their crew around them and that this can be a really a nice, reliable source of additional income in their careers, help them pay rent. Like when I was on Ampled, you know, I was bringing in like $100 a month or something like that, which isn't that much because I was doing it on a very small scale. But it made a big difference in my everyday life in terms of making space to make music a part of it. And I know had I leaned into that a little bit more, there could be, you know, a significant chunk of change coming through something like this to support just the ongoing paying rent while making art, which is the thing. On that note, another thing that I think is worth

celebrating is that in the end, Ample basically made $250,000 available to musicians. It did do what it was trying to do in a successful way. This is the other thing that I want to aspire to or, you know, define success as is our local scenes starting to work Merlot into the way that that they operate. You know, can this be something that small independent labels, artist collectives, niche genres in different places, you know, DIY spaces, whatever, that this can actually be a useful tool to make the local space go and to make it easier for musicians to do what they do in community in real life, you know, at the level of local. And we'll see how that goes. We're just getting

started, but I'm really optimistic and looking forward to continuing to pour energy into that. Yeah. So where can people go to find the platform and support it if they're interested or get involved? Yeah. So we're at merlot.space. That's the website. If you go to merlot.space, you'll see at the very top right now, just for a couple more days, we've got a Kickstarter going to kind of keep the lights on for the rest of the year. We'd be tremendously grateful for any support from anyone who's listening today to get us to where we need to go there. And also at the front page, if you scroll down to the bottom, there's links to email us find us on github find our discord there's plenty of ways to plug in and connect yeah yeah so i'm hoping this all works for

the best and hoping that there's a way for artists to create music in ways that are sustainable and not unbelievably exploitative yeah thanks so much for having us man it's been truly a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you so much. Maybe so. Yeah. Yeah. And this has been, it could happen here and find us in the usual places. Yeah. Go.

I don't know. Go make trouble for the people. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website, cool zone media.com or check us out on the, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series,

The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions,

sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers.

Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.