Simon Vansintjan of Mirlo - A Cooperative Music Marketplace - Lorenzo's Music Podcast

[Music] hi I'm Tom Ray from Lorenzo's music podcast and I am here today to talk to someone from a music platform that I

only recently discovered from another musician that I spoke to on this podcast and uh I am here to hear more about it learn more about it and I'm kind of excited to do this so uh why don't you

tell the people who you are and what it is you do hey um I'm Simon I am a web developer I

play music um but mainly the reason I'm here is because I a I spend time working on a platform called Meo which is a

digital Marketplace uh SL merch uh Marketplace for music um so it's like band camp but it is uh collectively

owned by the workers um and it uh it's open source so that's kind of the the whole premise behind it which is also one of the other reasons why I'm interested in it because we're in open

source band and A Creative Commons band so finding platforms like this that are based on open source uh is really what I love to pursue and look into so first of

all what I want to ask is it's Merlo Mero Mero I kept I keep switching it in my head it's Miro it's technically it's Miro um but I think probably the only

people who pronounce it like that are me and my co-owner um it's it's a SP it's the Spanish word for Blackbird okay so airlo is a blackbird that would explain

the logo when you first go to the page I was gonna ask about that next too because it it's even sort of the same thing in the icon for it and everything like the favon that's on there okay that was that was my first question was was

it that or is it just a misspelling of Mero like the wine you know yeah and it's funny because our branding uses like a kind of like off

burgundy right that is exactly why I thought that yeah yeah so um now this came about and uh it I'm trying to figure out where to start well first of

all tell us exactly what uh the platform does so it's a well I mean like honestly like the best comparison is it's like

band camp um it it's a you sign up as a musician and you are able to upload your music um we've tried to make that as easy as possible because we realize you know that's hassle a lot of people have a lot of

music um and you can sell your albums for a price or for free um and you can also sell a merch uh for whatever you

want um and band camp also does this like it also has support tiers like patreon um but we've kind of made that a little bit more prominent than band camp does because because I don't think a lot

of musicians actually use that functionality on band camp um and we're in early stages we've only been up and

running for a year okay we've had about 600 musicians sign up for the platform um we're very like I would say we're

pretty Scrappy uh we don't we don't take uh and haven't taken um like Venture Capital Money um which you know like that is like when band camp got started in 20

2 or whatever it was they received I think it's about $5 million in investment but like in today's month dollars I think it was like three million or whatever then but like an equivalent of $5 million we don't have

that kind of money so it's happening in our free time um it's and we're trying to like piece it together it's if it's a it's also a like political project um

we're kind of rooted we both like our our co-owners have experience in mutual Aid projects and those kind of things and the the whole solid economy

Cooperative uh economy kind of situation um so it is it is a little bit of an experiment in co-ownership but also like

uh what happens like how how do we pay for this and how do we facilitate that we can work on this without actually just having money to throw at it because and that's one of the other things that

I find uh kind of intriguing too is that Pursuit now if you look at the site that you guys have and even in the about section there's a

really condensed version of kind of how it came about in the history and like what it came from and when you dig into those go into some of those links if you go further than just the blurb as to it

got started because there were members of this this and this now one of those being amped and another one being resonance and if you click back to look

at those it is a lot of not documentation but like what's the word uh kind of uh mission statements mission statements sort of uh

what we PS what we plan to do that it's a lot more brainstorming and kind of thinking of a better world music-wise

sort of sort of thinking and really transparent sort of things and I do like that and also because you were saying it's like band camp and the problem being where band camp they got that

Venture capitalism and or Capital money and then they couldn't fund it because it's like oh yeah we didn't really think of that or I don't know there are a lot of people that build things going oh we can

do this and musicians can sell their work and we'll get money for it and it's like yeah but musicians don't make money and music is now streaming for free or

you know there's really not a you know write down idea equals pile of money sort of stuff so I'm really intrigued by the way that you guys are going about

this I really like the whole transparency thing so while building this platform and you said it's only been around for a year how do you go about doing something like this what is

the concept in how it actually started and you went forward with it like tell me the tell me the origin stories of when you first started working there and

what the experience was like for you yeah so um like like you alluded to it came out of these two projects called

hled and resonate and um resonate has been around for like n years at this point I would say and has honestly like uh has a

very troubled complicated history that ties into a little bit of like the crypto stuff and oh really um yeah um

and uh um and then like also ampled came around I think in like 2019 um but a lot of it

uh ran into this kind of um the need for people to do it full-time um and wanting to make it a

day job and like making it sustainable and these are all very like real concerns and very legitimate concerns like how musicians don't get you know a lot of musicians don't get paid some some musicians are lucky enough to be

able to get paid to do what they want to do uh but most musicians aren't um and they make their ends meet in other ways um it it is something it's like a valid

critique like to maintain a platform uh is a lot of work like a tech platform is a lot of work um and so there was like there were all of these rubs around um

who's getting compensated but also if no one's getting compensated who's making the decisions about what work should be getting done and if the people doing the

work are not empowered to actually make decisions about how they do the work um what kind is that like cooperate is is

that fair um who like there's just a lot of like very complicated things to to think through and talk through and I

think um both resonate and ampled like kind of like ran into that wall of um how to Grapple with the fact that you

don't have money um while also like staying true to your principles and compensating people for it being in a band exactly while also and like actually

being in a band is actually a very great example of like doing something cooperatively right like you have bands where you have the person who calls the shots right but you also have bands that

are very distributed like everyone writes a piece of the song or like there's just like the way that you yeah and it's like it's a huge lesson of like collaborating with people in ways that

are actually not taught to us in in like normal society yeah like it's it's unlike what you if you're a painter you can't go well three of us are going to hold the brush at the same time and make

this painting although that would be a brilliant thing to do but anyway I mean I think there's people who do do that there might be yeah yeah that is what it's like it's it's like several people

working on the same piece that comes out as one um and yeah it's it's a different way to think um short example being I don't know if I forget the name of the

movie but it's the one where it's it's an indie movie about a band but the guy has a giant uh like papier-mâché head um I want to say it's Herman something like that anyway seen the entire concept that

part's not important I was watching it with my wife and there's this part where this person who wears this papier-mâché head starts playing and then the other musicians are listening that first heard it for the first time and they come up

and they start playing on the keyboard with him and she turns to me and she's like oh that must be driving you nuts they're messing with this stuff and I'm like no that's what it's like I want that I love that part of it where it's like oh what if this here and it's

like yeah and then you just build off of it and I feel like that's kind of like the Cooperative that you were speaking of before with and I realize I called it amped before ampled is what I meant to

say I mispronounced it no that's that's fine um and well so we basically like a bunch of people who like had met each other through these spaces started

talking about our experiences in them um and we we kind of like built this it was super small there was like six of us a collective and we called ourselves fun music place um with the emphasis your

GitHub account is under yeah yeah exactly um and um which is like a little

bit confusing um but the idea was um we're we have a critique of the systems in place and like part of the critique

is also um actually like uh wow okay resonate was trying to do streaming

um and streaming is not profitable I mean Spotify is not profitable and you can see that in the way that I mean it's very profitable for some people um but

like the company Spotify maybe they posted a profit this year like disc quar or something like that right but one of the things and I think it was actually

one of the ampled um presentations that was put on the site is the fact that the actual music streaming part of it that gets paid out is referred to as like

part of the cost it's not referred to as their model it's like in here you know cost of you know cost of expenses or that whatever they refer to it as not as

actual artists yeah yeah yeah and like that's why they're doing the podcasts because they don't have to pay royalties on those that's why they are doing AI generated music that's why they're doing

the like in-house musicians that they just flood their play lists with all that stuff right like it it is it's not a profitable Business Band Camp however

until uh as you know they published their profit statements until 2017 I want to say and they were B profitable yeah um and so that's kind of why we

were like well we have and there was also this aspect of like resonate was I had written a lot of the code for it um so I was fairly familiar with it and we were like well a lot of components for

this thing are here already we could just like pivot it to be for another thing and this is the beauty of Open Source as well right um and take it and

build this other thing under this other like idea with this other um with this new

proposal and part of that proposal was we're going to do it as a worker Cooperative rather than a multi-stakeholder cooperative and if we can prove that it's successful and that

there is actually like a income stream in it we're going to see about whether we can exit to community being like we'll start bringing in musicians or

we'll start figuring out ways to do the decision making in ways that are much more um like equ like Equitable and and responsive to the needs but in the

meantime the people who are actually going to be doing the labor should be the people making the decisions and we're trying like it it is like a explicit decision that we're also making

of like creating space for people to give feedback and that I think a lot of that is done through it being an open source project yeah and the other thing too that I think would be important to a

lot of the people that I know in the open source music sort of in Creative Commons uh space one of the problems that some of them have with it right now

is the fact that the yet third buying or second I don't know the band camp was bought again just recently by another company and they are union Busters and

they're not allowing and that's a problem like up until then they were like band camp is what they would use they wouldn't use any other platform but now they're they're Union Busters and that goes against their ideals so

something like this and also the transparency of what you guys are doing I think that's important to people in certain formats as well just because that plus with everything being closed down now and people just buying out companies and doing whatever the hell

they want well I mean seriously there's a lot of really everybody was like why have a website anymore why use anything yourself anymore or not you and now all

this stuff is happening we've got bands we've got companies being bought out everything is just really strange in the plat online platforms right now so it's nice to see smaller groups of people

with transparent sort of ways to go about it doing things like this so it's I feel like you're I feel like you're in the right place and time for what you guys are doing right now first of all

now second let's get into the actual platform itself now you you had said that it is um like band camp and it kind of is but let's put it this way it seems

on its face on its face that's a weird way to put that it see it seems that it's really more streaming like you were saying rather than band camp is still

built on downloads even though nobody downloads anymore I mean they will to support a band but nobody really does anything with those downloads yeah so the platform seems more it's a streaming platform but it's really when you get

into it especially when you sign up as an artist you realize it's more of membership options and merch like you had said before so tell me more about the actual execution of what artists can

do on the platform yeah so H that's interesting that you point out the stream so it is we make it fairly transparent and so this is part of the code that we took

from resonate which was a streaming app um and I had written uh and we just took part of it and so there is a kind of

front and center a player right so you click on a song or album and you it will play the the album in its entirety and

um I've like heard really goofy stories if like people will use band camp in that same way but they'll they'll have

like they'll have like um uh it'll it'll be like okay I'm playing this music in this tab and then I'm playing this other music in this tab once it's done like

they have to basically manage the playlist aspect of band camp um so we do have that like little bit of like we have a play C and that it's we don't

surface it and there's reasons for that um so like um the once you start getting into the the plays are still technically promotional plays which is what they are on band

camp because once they're not promotional plays you start getting into the space of uh streaming music music and music licensing and having to report

those kind of things um so that actually like it it kind of complicates things now the truth is that we don't have we haven't set we have like the

infrastructure to set a cap on how many times something can get played but we haven't actually implemented that yet and that's just a thing that will end up happening like on band camp right now if

you play a song The Artist can say this song can be played five times before someone and we're gonna ask people to to buy right so we're we're gonna Implement that too but we just it's there's so

many other things to do first like B's actually a very complicated piece of software um uh but so that's that's why and but there is just like there is a

little bit better of a I think the the user experience around playing music is better and it's something that we're working on um to also just improve in some other places as well so like if you

have a blog post and you are someone who likes writing about about music um you can write you basically have your own blog you can share your own songs in it and then there will be like the way that

band camp does in their blog um just play the music straight through right and so we'll have that functionality as well but anyone can use it not just B cam

um yeah so you join as a musician you upload your albums people can play your albums but there is really we're trying to put front and center the like idea of follow this musician

And subscribe to them and give them $2 a month right or like $5 a month and uh have that be the way and then you'll receive every updates and for musicians

there's a way to say like if someone follows me at this tier um they'll automatically get in anything new that I upload um so like you know I'm a musician and I have this tier and

someone's paying me $10 a month for $5 a month they will automatically get every single new release but that is where it does differ from band camp because now you're talking more of a patreon model

but a patreon model that is specifically music based which I think is an interesting angle as well because you can do this on patreon but it's not

meant for music but when you first come and this was my my confusion when I first joined the platform after IID heard about it I uploaded um a song and

one of our latest songs just to check it out and see what was in there and I didn't even realize that uh because of the layout it does look like band camp and I was you know and you tie it to a

payment platform I thought that payment platform was just so people could buy the download and I saw subscribe on there but I thought subscribe was just like oh you know it's like following a

musician and that was the confusion I had the when I looked into it I was like oh and then it says subscrib and then you uh can choose what the tiar are and then that's after I went into it and

started trying to hook the things up then I realized what it was but when I first joined I thought really was just like a like jendo or a free music archive where it's like you can upload

your music here and people can stream it and download it is what I thought at first but then I realized the download feature isn't even really part of it until you start subscribing to the band

and all that so that was my first experience with it um so so I would say that is the the Forte on the Subscribe

Feature is really uh an interesting take on it it's it's like in Indiegogo without the crowdfunding it's monthly sub subst uh substainable

sustainable yeah and and I once I realized that it made a heck of a lot more sense to me because that's when I saw the blog posts and things like that and all those can be behind the subscription correct and you can have

public facing ones yeah exactly yeah and you can even say this person like this this tier of people can receive this blog post but anyone who pays less than

that a month cannot yeah um and that is something we did took take from aold as well and like similarly to band camp patreon is like a sensible business

model um in the context of music making which was also started by a musician right yeah yeah um like it it is like a it is a way it's like it it

just makes like the the the path to making money Mak sense there's not you're not dealing with and I think this is like a thing that we have to content with in the music industry there's so much

like uh Capital control over musical over music from these three big companies who

just own so much like intellectual property that we like there's no way to like there's no way we're ever going to be able to play Rolling Stones right or like or sell Like a Rolling Stones album

on our yeah on our uh platform um so you're like who who are you talking to who are you who are who like who are the indie labels who are the smalltime

musicians and it's like it's like a way to kind of support those people who aren't already making money off of just having made music 30 years ago and it

being worth millions of dollars right right yeah yeah okay I also like the fact too that you do have an option for adding a Creative Commons license to it

as a Creative Commons musician that's always important to me so when I saw that in there I'm like there you go I even signed up for a distributor once because they allowed us to do that and I

realized after the fact I'm like oh no streaming service that we're Distributing to is going to say that this is Creative Commons so it was just kind of a thing they put in there it was weird and then it disappeared after

while anyway yeah that's interesting I that mean that one came and this is the like the Community Driven thing like I had would never have thought to add that

but we've had a lot of people from I would say like the fety verse right like and um those folks um they like

decentralized internet take interest in us and that was I found out about you yeah I found out about you on the fediverse nice yeah so I mean that's that's the that's that's that that came

from user request and like it is not a hard thing to implement right like on our end it's just like a little it's a little drop down right uh and then you know um but like I would have never

thought to do that myself and I will say uh the benefit of it especially because there is a very passionate Creative

Commons community and it all comes from uh oddly enough the era of online piracy of music when music downloading was a

thing it's so funny streaming actually ruined piracy um and actually made music less profitable for The Scrappers because when we were having people

download our stuff that was people would seek it out people people were just like oh I can download this for free and do what I want with it and now it's just like why would I download like we don't get nearly as many downloads as we used

to now that people can listen because it's not how people listen to music it's a strange like they kind of won the music industry because of this anyway

that's conversation for a different time what I'm getting at is um having that in there uh it makes it easier for people to search for that and having the ability to even filter songs by that

they're looking for new Creative Commons artists to play on their podcasts to share the music with so uh they're like listening groups that get together on

the weekends on uh like Facebook groups or other sort or on uh jitsy or other sort of video platforms and they just sit there and play new music that they've listened to on the Creative

Commons realm of music so having that as a searchable thing I think would also benefit if there is a lot of talk from the fediverse having that searchable by even different licenses that's actually

important some people won't do the full-on non-commercial non- derive because that's like just an inch away from being just full-on copywritten to

some people whereas I I just think the entire concept of it is fine across the board anyway just wanted to add that in there as some insight as to maybe something to uh yeah I was I was

wondering if you were it looked like you were I didn't know if you were bored or if you were writing something because you were looking down I also I'm a FID so I will also doodle but I am also

taking notes you don't realize how many fidgeting toys I have around me so I make sure that I'm not tapping on stuff um so now uh with this being created I

really am there there are a few things that always I want to learn more about and uh one of them is creating an LLC putting this together like it I I get

getting in a room with people and going we should do this thing and it's like sure I could write the code and what if we put it up here but putting together an LLC and LLC and coming together with

a mission statement and A business plan is something where yeah I should do that is what I should say but I don't so tell me about actually like brainstorming

this and putting it together how does one go about this curi oh man um so we were thinking about doing this and at the same time we were like well if if we

actually want to I so I'm I'm the programmer on team um and the options were basically use stripe uh which is a payment processor

or use I've heard that it's really easy to work with as a developer using stri yes it's fantastic and there's there's problems with it for sure um they are changing I mean I think that's a whole

other conversation we can I could talk about that right yeah okay um and but the thing is that people are familiar with PayPal but for for a point of view of like we're

we're basically making a pitch and we have a we want to build a like minimum viable idea minimum viable thing we need to use stripe but to be able to use

stripe you you need to be incorporated um and oh yeah okay yeah um like especially if you're if you're going to be the payment processor you

don't need to be able to use stripe if you're a musician receiving a on aform selfemployed okay and that is one of the things we considered we were like what if we just

put this as like Simon self-employed like like single person LLC and then like we talk later about how we go forward um but we were like no we really

want to start in in like the like in the in the spirit of like this is going to be collectively owned um so at that time there were five or six of us and three

of us were based in in the US and we were like well let's start talking to a lawyer um we have so I'm in I'm in

Washington DC um and we are part like of a community of um like a a Cooperative Community here so there's like people who are The Cooperative developers like

people who spend time thinking about coop coop worker co-ops consumer co-ops all those kind of things and they recommended a lawyer um and we went to

go talk to them and um we have a blog post detailing this on our blog um but basically um we had like two or three consultation calls with the they were

super generous in that time uh though realistically they were like you know put down $3,000 and then we will write they're not going to write our bylaws for us there that's um but they gave us

guidance on how do we incorporate we incorporated as a limited liability with three members in DC um and then we started talking to the lawyer about

writing bylaws um one of our co-owners Alex is very inspired by like sociocracy and hierarch hierarchical non sorry

non-h hierarchical ways of making decisions um and uh we we basically brought that into that whole by loss conversation um but yeah so we

incorporated as an LLC which allowed us to set up uh stripe um and then ev Everything since that has been just kind

of like figuring it out as we go um we don't have no one's holding our hands like as much as I think we would like um there are groups that

do help with that but they have limited capacity um and they also like I think that there is hesitancy within the Cooperative space about platform co-ops

um simply because um the idea of a platform what is a platform right is it's a business

um but so much of these communities are so uh not communities these businesses are dependent on having a cash injection of

several million dollars before they ever become profitable and I think that there is just like caution around approaching those

things which I understand um and like also people have seen like anold not working out and resonate not working out and they're just like what is what are

you doing that's different um but we've been you know like we've been stumbling along for a year um a lot of it is relational um so inter

relational but also relational outside of our group um and just like building trust and trying to get on the same page and

seeing what the way forward is um I think probably our biggest hurdle was agreement on the legal aspects of like the bylaws but then also like how do you

compensate Founders um how do you no one's getting paid so like how do you actually make it so that people get paid um we did a Kickstarter um which was

successful but not successful like in like we raised $15,000 which is great but you can't pay three people on for a

year on a $15,000 um so uh you know I work full-time uh and Alex also works H you

do work full-time okay yeah all right not on Miro on a different thing Goa okay I was like wow all right what about

speaking of that I mean what about the on top of getting paid for creating this platform the platform itself has to exist somewhere and the existing

platform has to stream music over bandwidth on servers so how are you doing that yeah so I mean I can get

fairly technical about that it's also fairly simple so I'm not a um I'm not a like server engineer I don't like I don't I don't enjoy yeah I don't enjoy

going into servers and like setting them up correctly so we just use a service called render um which basically you tell it what you want and it like manages most of that and it costs more

um it's it's more expensive there's equip like Heroku is a similar service if people are familiar with that yeah um and there's like open source versions of these kind of actually I'm not sure

there's an open source version of them I've I remember looking for it like two years ago um there's like much more like you you know you roll up your sleeves and you do it and it works but I I'm

very like please just do it for me um and uh the the way so we use render and there render handles most of that for us we're

actually in the middle of a migration of moving all of our audio and images from render to something that's a little bit more like barebones

server just because it's cheaper um so right now we're paying about $350 a month on render which we can cover so we we also we actually um I don't know if

you're familiar with the term like self dog fooding um which is this like Indie web idea of use the tool yourself um so

we use uh Miro to do our own we have a patreon style page like a supporter page on Miro and we raise I think it's about

$420 right now um through that and it basically covers server costs um and server costs are about $350 but that we

can get that down probably $100 like two two $150 maybe or $200 um simply by moving to like a cheaper way of of

storing our files so that's currently what that's the main thing I'm working on currently and that's kind of the big picture architectural uh

situation um but it's all fairly like I mean there's a lot of because of the way that uh Venture capitalism has supported the tech industry there's actually you

can get fairly far with cheap or free tools like the first few months we didn't really pay for for like even the server stuff because they're like you can use this for x amount for free and

then we're like oh people are using this we need to start paying it because uh we we need to like you know uh do that kind of stuff but I a similar thing happened

to me uh I've created a method for us to be able to use GitHub to actually collaborate on full Daw files like every band member could download the Daw

session with the effects and plugins and everything and we could collaborate remotely which oddly enough I figured

out how to do this uh in December of 2019 so this was handy because you know what came in February of 20 and suddenly

we were still collaborating uh and we had this method but uh what happened was is after uploading like our third song with you know wave files and everything in it get a nice little note from GitHub

going hey you're uploading some big files here yeah and it's like oh yeah gota get so we had to use the uh uh lfs get sharing

and then now we pay for like and it's nothing it's like 10 well now we're up to $10 like a month yeah is what we're at and we just we were at$ five dollar a

month for the past couple years so yeah there are ways to do the files and different methods I didn't look into it the way that you guys did I just went what oh it's only five dollar a month

sure whatever yeah you know yeah problem solved yeah we're just doing it for uh I think oh I don't know I don't know

that I can estimate how many like several thousand W files right yeah yeah yeah it got expensive exactly and you know you know and we I don't want to go

too much into CU me I find this fascinating but other people are like just tell me about this music platform because I want to be like how do you plan to project for this and everything but you know what that's for the boardroom you and I are here to talk about this let's get into the design of

it so one thing you were talking about the player before and you said you designed the player interesting thing about it one is it's h it's one of those players where you play it on the page thing pops up at the bottom and the

player there and you can still navigate and listen to stuff as as you go through the page and look at other artists correct yeah yeah now I went to sign in again today because I to look at it

before our conversation I wasn't signed in I signed in the player popped up and it remembered what I last listened to on the page and I was like oh well that's a neat little feature that so I just wanted to tell you that was really cool

first of all great and uh so tell me about the design of this now who are you collaborating with graphic designers are you literally

doing this yourself like how is this going about so I am a programmer first and foremost um okay and I have done like ux work which is the usability

stuff but um one of the things that I have a really hard time with is that when you're like I feel like the point of collaborating is that you create tension kind of between like and

positive tension right like in the in the sense of like you have different opinions and that forces you to work harder it forces you to think about things to think things through whereas if you're doing it on your own

actually you're just like this works good enough um like this is like this achieves the purpose um we have a had a

couple of people come through with great uh design and um like actual UI ideas um and and this is another benefit of the

open source things um one of them well I'll shout out two of them um one of them is Tim and Tim is a uh like a graphic designer and has like work

through the brand identity and like those kind of things and brought them together in that sense um and the other one um really need to shout out is LK who has been like was at resonate helped

us with those kind of things and um llk is not a coder okay L was like I have such strong opinions about this I am going to

torture myself and learn how to do this so that I can make this look as good as possible and like we we were not able we weren't able to pay people and there is

like there's still a long way for us to go um but like basically the the way that it looks now is courtesy of the work that l k put in and just like

teaching themselves um teaching themselves HTML and CSS and like I'm like wow this is heck outed this is cool thank you um so it's it's been a

collaboration because it is like uh like I'm I'm able to do to like the bigger like code things um but the like it's

also kind of stalled a little bit since L is a so like I said there this is not their thing LK is a working musician and I put that in quotes only because like

they don't um they make money for making music but it's through contracts with uh working other projects like making music for audio projects or for games or for

those kind of things right like the way that like they're able to live off of it barely um but so they are a working musician but it's not through sales from

their albums um which they do have so they were our first musician on the platform as well um and they're they trial run a lot of our stuff

um and uh so yeah it's just been this like kind of uh collaboration thing where we're trying to be Scrappy about it well we're not trying to if we could get pay if we could pay someone to do

the work then we would love that um yeah we've talked about BR just like a band I would love to pay somebody to promote our stuff than figure it out myself you

know exactly um and so there's there's there's gaps in our like UI um and there's gaps in our functionality um but

like we're trying to fix them and it'll take some time yeah and it's I mean it's a very nice site it works well it's not slow so you've got that going for you

it's not not something where people are going to have a bad experience and just wait it's going to get better no it's pretty good right now it's where you are and uh thinking of that so moving forward how are you working on getting

the word out what is kind of a promotional plan or to really build up the community and actually expand this project what are you guys looking to do

in the future yeah that's a big question um we've kind of just coming out of a period of some like internal um oh turbulence like some like

we're going to figure out we're figuring out how we're working out together um we have like we we ran out of our Kickstarter money we were able to

basically pay one of our co-owners significant chunk of money over that time um able to reimburse some of our

initial Investments um so but we did get a grant to put on an event in DC um so like I am based in DC and the

the event will be um basically exploring the solidarity economy and and music and the music industry and and how we we're going to call it I think the name we've settled

on is otherwise music Gathering um reimagining the music industry and otherwise music Gathering is an acronymous OMG so that was

okay um and um we're uh we're we're going to basically bring people together from DC but also from different areas people who've like

worked in cooperatives or who have done like music platforms um and that's kind of where we want to like start with some of that this going to be in May at the

end of May um we're going to be doing it in a super Scrappy music venue here um who were like yeah you can use this

during the day um and uh I'm really looking forward to it it's going to be I think I think it'll be small like we're not going to have like a big you know maybe 60 70 people um but it's just

going to be looking at like how do we actually build um Community around this project and yeah I think the important part of that like is

that Miro is a is like a little bit of a flag right it's like a this is an attempt at doing

things differently and we're putting that flag in the ground and we're seeing you know how it lands where it lands what people like um and it could be that like it's not the way to move forward

right like it could be that there's other ways of doing it or it could be that you know like it just steadily like grows and improves um we have like I

think that it like with there is a lot of potential in the actual product but I also think like if I'm being serious with myself right and I'm like is the

internet that as it currently is organized sustainable um and it's not like streaming songs is actually like environmentally really bad and we that's

what that's the thing that we do right and yeah um and so like what are ways to actually organize projects in a way and I think being open source is like a really

critical part of it and this is now I'm talking as me I'm not necessarily talking as Meo right and I think being open source is like an important part of this but it's like okay so what does it

look like to do something like Miro on a local basis like what if there is a like uh a DC Miro where people build

community in D in DC around these things but it's also a way to pool money right so what if um you know right now we take a 7% cut

um but what if that was optional right like musicians chose and what if that 7% went into a pool that that we were like okay well we're using this money to buy

a music venue that is accountable to musicians right like what's the like outright a music venue or are you saying for an event uh outright okay all right I like that idea that's why I asked

because I'm like okay I like where you're going with this all right yeah yeah um so I mean and not like like what's just like it doesn't have to be a music venue but like what's the actually like what's the best way to support

musicians in your community which can be International right like like that's that is the case right now but it also can and should be local um and I think

like that's the kind of the question that I think we all should be tackling with and I think murlo helps with that you're sparking an idea in me that actually came from another conversation

that I had with someone and it all kind of intertwines I spoke with a musician out of New York and he uh leases a building because he's in New York there are a bunch of different like

foundational warehouses that are emptied out and all that kind of stuff and he buys the place or rents the place and then separates the rooms into practice spaces for different musicians and I was

like well that's brilliant and I like that in the sense too because that funding can go into this that and the other putting uh internet into the building having amenities that the bands could have that are also part of a

luxury rather than their like hourly places that have all that you need for studio recording but instead have a place where you rent a band space but the money itself goes into say a 24

Channel mixing board or a studio room where people could come in and record their EP book time maybe even have money for a listen to me I'm getting all all worked up over here you know have a an

actual engineer in there and you saying this sort of thing it's like yes it is more than that rather than just say buy into this building and the rent goes to that it's creating a collective or a

co-op in the sense that has this and maybe even buying a building outright and people could come into it almost like I don't want to say it's like making it condo but you get what I'm

saying like you're making my mind open up in that sort of sense where it's like there's the creative Collective it doesn't matter what kind of musicians you are you all want to do the same thing I mean promotion is promotion I've

learned just as Pro much promotion from authors as I have from other musicians because we're all trying to do the same thing get our creative work out there and some platforms it's like oh they're

doing it this way that could apply to what I'm doing here in this you know and you saying that just made me think of that conversation that I had with another musician that was on the show

and so I like that and I I enjoy that yeah and like I think like experiment we have to experiment because I mean the truth is that um I mean one of the

things that what cooh or Alex likes to say is that musicians have at various points in time been kind of the canaries in the coal mine for how capitalism is

about to Pivot right and you see that with like Napster and the streaming economy and but You' see saw that like uh hundred years ago at this point with

how records became like a commodity and those kind of things um and I I feel like it is not going to get

better from up top right like we have to do it from below and that means and I I because of other reasons I'm always thinking it's like we need space we need

like we need to own property that is like collectively owned and that is like and you're right like yeah in DC there is kind of one practice space and it's a very great space like the people who

work there are lovely but it's expensive like like honestly it's like an expensive place to go practice um and the fact that there's only one in this city of like 500,000 people with

actually a really thriving music scene is kind of like what's Happening Here Right like it's just um and musicians already also like to be clear like musicians already do these things right

you're playing in your friends basements you're setting up House shows you're like doing porch shows like this is a thing that like musicians have done for such a long time is to like pull

resources in a way and so the questions is like how do you do that deliberately in a way that actually is able to be sustainable because House shows end like when that people who live in that house

get evicted right because R going up or so like those kind of questions around actually being deliberate about how we

decide what we put our money into and how we pull money and those kind of things and like I like Miro is an attempt at saying like hey we could do it this way but it doesn't necessarily

mean that this is the way to do it it's just an idea um it seems to have traction people seem to be into it and I think we've benefited from the stuff

around B like we basically we there was urgency when when band camp was so sold to song Trader for us to actually that and that was part of the LLC process right it was like oh we should do this

um because if we don't do this now this is like it feels like a very opportune moment to to C it's one of those things where it's just silently going to be one day like we told you you know nobody's everybody was upset when it first

happened and now I feel like nobody's talking about it again and it's that any day could just pop up like we decided to do this yeah and now you have to pay to put your stuff up here it it what it

could be whatever yeah so if people wanted to know more about Miro and actually join in on the conversation first of all where's the website located

because it's not just a dotc site yeah turns out that do would have been very expensive um so it's Miro dospace um which is a cute little play that we're

also hoping to be able to play on at some other like you own your Miro space right got but we haven't really explored that at fully so it's M.S space um and

we have Mero dospace on Instagram um that you can follow us there we also have a Discord for which there is a link if you are interested in being on Discord uh I know it doesn't work for

everyone um and uh you know we have our GitHub is also like so all our code is open source you can see it on GitHub um and you can

you know pitch in look at it um you can explore all the musicians that are on there uh we'll add functionality to search by Creative

Commons once this migration is out of the way um and yeah that's that's the that's the pitch I guess great all right well I want to thank you so much for talking with me today it was great

meeting you yeah thanks Tom thanks for having us on reaching out and wanted to talk [Music]