Just a quick response to speak to what I know about here.
Membership is free as an artist. Listening isn’t.
As a member you get voting rights in the coop, you are part of the coop. As a listener you are not. As a listener, you can join the coop by paying a small annual fee. You can also become a member through other contributions, such as being a worker, offering time to work on projects/infrastructure/etc.
None of this membership actually pays for streaming, for listening.
To listen/stream, you pay and we have a credits system. Rather than a monthly membership you pay per play. How much you pay is our stream 2 own system, so a very small amount for the first play, more on the 2nd play, increasing to the 9th play. After 9 plays you will have paid roughly the price of a track download but further streams of that track are free.
More details on pricing are here - Pricing and credits - Docs - Resonate Community Forum
and on membership - Becoming a member - Docs - Resonate Community Forum
After all of that, you should have some credits for free to try out listening. If not, please raise it as a help request and it will get looked in to. If you’ve used them all up and want to keep listening you will need to top up.
You absolutely do not need credits to upload music as an artist or label.
Also, the phrasing around a ‘qualifying track’ is based around the need for ‘qualifying contributions’ to confer membership. No-one is checking if they like your music, or if it’s good enough, etc. but it does need to be ‘1 track of original music uploaded to the Resonate Platform as an artist’ every two years. Details can be found in the membership link I posted above.
I hope that helps and welcome aboard.