Music Streaming and the Platform Cooperative

A Match Made in Music Heaven (Finally, Some Good News!)

So here's the thing about The Pack Music Cooperative that gets me genuinely excited: it's not just another start-up with grandiose claims about "disrupting" an industry (because, let’s be honest, the only thing traditional capitalist start-ups disrupt is their founders' sleep schedules and their investors' bank balances).

The Pack is something different - it's a patron-powered music streaming service that's actually forging mutually beneficial, direct, and transparent connections between local businesses, local listeners, and local musicians. With the radical notion that maybe, just maybe, we can create a sustainable music community through the ancient art of not exploiting each other.

“I know, revolutionary stuff. It’s like we’re just nice people or something. Ewww…”

The theory of cooperatives is that they enable groups of individuals to gather around a shared cause - in this case, the creation (or rather, re-creation) of a healthy music industry that doesn't treat independent artists like disposable content machines. We've long believed the music industry was overdue for an internal revolution, but when digital distribution and a global pandemic created a perfect storm that crushed both live and recorded music revenues, we knew we had to do something more than bitch about it on social media.

We had to find a way to empower independent musicians to take back control of the means of distribution for their creative work. Because if artists don't control how their music gets distributed, they'll continue being at the mercy of tech bros who think "artist development" means teaching musicians how to make better TikTok content.

Over 8+ years, The Pack has evolved from a tiny yet annoying advocacy organisation (basically me shouting into the political void about streaming inequality) into a registered cooperative - the first platform cooperative in Western Australia, which makes us either pioneers or slightly unhinged, depending on your perspective.

Years of research fed our business model development, acknowledging that while the internet has amazing power for organising creative talent, it also has incredible potential for fostering unhealthy ecosystems built on surveillance, data harvesting, and labour practices that would make Victorian factory owners blush.

Having wandered in the start-up wasteland for years, we became thoroughly weary of the hyper-capitalist rhetoric behind many incubators and accelerators. The notion that we, as a start-up, were actually the product - and the investors our consumers - made us feel both distrustful and used. It still does. Frankly, we think it should make everyone feel that way…

Our business model evolution came from acknowledging that we didn't want to feel like a product, but like a solution. So we committed to inverting our business model and evolving away from typical shareholder-oriented capitalism toward something more socially oriented, which in start-up terms is like deciding to swim upstream in a river full of sharks who all have MBAs.

“This led us into the world of platform cooperativism, which sounds fancy but basically means "what if technology served communities instead of extracting from them?" - a concept so radical it apparently needed its own academic terminology.”

The beautiful thing about cooperatives is they're not actually a new economic paradigm, not even close - they're a business model hundreds of years old that happens to work really well when you apply it to digital platforms (and frankly, any system of value exchange). Amazingly your grandmother's recipe for dealing with people (‘do as you would be done by’) also works in the digital age.

Did you know, 2025 was national year of the cooperative?

The cooperative structure inspired us because it creates autonomous associations of people united to meet common economic, social, and cultural aspirations through jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprises.

To be honest, we were initially suspicious of claims that digital technologies might produce radical democratisation (because we'd seen enough start-up pitches to know that "revolutionary" is code for "the same exploitation but with an app"). But in the stark absence of better models, and with genuine commitment to equity, we decided to explore less-travelled paths.

Beyond our slightly naïve fantasy of a fair, less competitive, and more connected music community (the audacity!), it was the potential of democratic organisational structures that drew us to evolve from a social enterprise company into a platform cooperative.

While cooperatives are one of the earliest business forms, what's novel about platform cooperatives is applying these principles to digital organisations. We incorporate democratic governance with transparent decision-making, always built on internationally recognised cooperative principles: things like community ownership, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. Basically, all the things that make tech bros squirm.

We wanted to tap into distributed ownership and community autonomy. We didn't want to fall prey to the Web2 cult of monopoly and technological oligarchy that's so embedded in start-up culture - you know, the bit where a few billionaires own everything and everyone else gets to enjoy the "sharing economy" (where you share your labour and they keep the profits).

We needed to provide artists who'd been harshly impacted by streaming realities and pandemic income loss a way to control their own fortunes. We hoped to give them a meaningful alternative to major streaming services by creating real connections between artists, local communities, and local businesses. Imagine that - a platform that connects people instead of isolating them for advertising purposes.

As we developed our model, we had to acknowledge that any business model risks reproducing the power dynamics it aims to disrupt without focused governance structures and committed people. Any technology is ultimately designed by humans, and embedded in that design is the will of whoever's making the decisions - which is why we embedded immutable commitments to revenue sharing for musicians into our governing documents.

We're painfully aware of "sharing economy" structures that started with utopian ideals of freedom and connection but became less than ethical about commodifying the labour of underrepresented workforces. Looking at you, every gig economy platform that calls workers "partners" while treating them like disposable contractors.

As a society, we've become increasingly reliant on technology to solve social and cultural issues, so we feel we must remain conscious of technology's impacts to date - we know they’re certainly not all positive. While we can apply novel technologies, if our governance (and our humanity) doesn't evolve, we risk reinforcing existing problems rather than solving them.

Spotify, of course, is a perfect example. It's unlikely that disempowering millions of independent musicians was an intended outcome, but the system built on basic shareholder capitalism has done exactly that, creating legions of disenfranchised creatives looking for alternatives that don't treat them like content livestock.

Remember that early peer-to-peer services like Napster also sought to decentralise music distribution but gave rise to massive piracy that almost crippled the industry. Spotify sold itself as the liberator but grew into a colonising superpower only marginally better than the pirates - at least pirates were honest about what they were doing. Bottom line: “…absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

There's always danger that without democratisation, equity, and community embedded in both code and governance, even we could reproduce existing inequalities. Worker cooperatives operate on "one member, one vote," which is theoretically feasible but challenging in large networked environments - it's hard to verify identity when your community spans continents and your members might be almost sentient AI bots (kidding, mostly).

But the high value of platform cooperative environments is enabling new democracy that gives independent musicians - traditionally politically underrepresented - unprecedented ability to influence their distribution systems and create localised support communities. And whatever happens - that has to be better than what we have.

The Pack operates under the 7 Cooperative Principles. Cool, huh?

Digital democracy means the old requirement for physical quorum is rethought. Online participation allows far more people to engage in decision-making, normalising whole-community engagement. This presents new challenges when digital participation could involve thousands or even millions of voting members - suddenly you're running a small democracy, which is both exciting and terrifying.

We acknowledge you cannot code ethics, and while digital technology is ‘technically’ value-neutral, the values of humans approaching technology drive everything. Algorithms can embed discriminatory elements unintentionally, so ethical organisational structure matters as much as community-building technology.

There still need to be massive changes to global economic structures beyond our cooperative's influence to enable these technologies to realise their potential for sector sustainability. But we believe we're at a point where we can amplify creative potential through cooperative principles.

We can apply centuries-old cooperative wisdom to evolve online distribution systems and innovate for good rather than profit extraction. Community-owned platforms represent the ideal economic shift for the music industry, because it's almost impossible to build shared wealth without shared ownership.

We're working to enable that shift for unsigned creators and producers. We want them valued not as cheap commodities for major labels to profit from, but as cultural value-creators in their own right - which apparently is a radical concept in an industry that's convinced artists they should be grateful for "exposure."

So we’re giving it our best shot. Cooperative models serve community rather than shareholders, and we're determined to gift that to our music community. We have the opportunity to create an alternative future for independent musicians - a better future - one that's empowering, progressive, and focused on real systems change, not just faux-socialist spin for exploitative online capitalism.

What’s the worst that could happen? We create a more equitable music industry? Oh! The horror!

If you’d like to see The Pack succeed in creating a better future for our music community, you can donate to our crowdfunding campaign here.