Hi all,
I really appreciate this conversation and everyone’s perspectives here!
I am still unsure of the best way to handle this topic moving forward, but some of my thoughts are below.
I’ve always had the vision that Resonate was a business with the goal of supporting its members and the greater community with a fairer and more sustainable way to stream music.
With that said, when I heard that an artist’s minimum contribution to become a member was…
I always felt that was a little lenient.
I respect all of the views and arguments for artists listed above, but if I understand this correctly, it always made me cringe at the fact that basically anyone could just create an audio clip, upload it to the platform, and have full-membership abilities for the next two years - unless we vetted the clips or accounts to make sure they’re “actually” artists and not just doing it to avoid paying listener membership fees.
If we want Membership to be widely available to people and don’t care much about it being an income stream for Resonate, then I think this current setup could be fine. We would just have to consider though if uploading a track is worth the right to vote at Resonate and potentially share in the profits.
I do like @remst8 's idea of having badges to signify roles of “membership” and I believe somewhere earlier in the year we floated the idea around of having one membership class with different ways to earn a full membership. (Example: upload 1 track = 50 membership points, volunteer 1 hour at the co-op = 20 membership points, pay €15 = 100 membership points; 100 membership points in total needed to become a member).
The only thing with that is we would still have to debate how many “points” each activity was worth, and it may be a bit complex for what we need right now.
Overall, although I still think it’s important that qualifications to become a member are made a bit stricter for the future, I think the most important thing now is to welcome others and get them streaming music on the platform, so I am okay with keeping membership a bit more lenient for now.
This would make streaming income the primary source of revenue for Resonate, and I think that once the infrastructure is fully in place, we could do a lot of good focusing on scaling here.