Episode 234: Simon Vansintjan on Mirlo  ## Metadata - Author: [[Sustain]] - Full Title: Episode 234: Simon Vansintjan on Mirlo - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2813d438-c9bf-4c88-8a7d-8841812c3a0e ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Mirlo's Unique Music Platform** - Simon Vansintjan describes Mirlo as an online record store combining Bandcamp and Patreon features. - It allows users to buy digital music directly from musicians and support them monthly. Transcript: Speaker 2 Simon, what's Merlot? Speaker 1 Merlot is basically an online record store. It's a way for you to buy digital music directly from musicians, as well as to throw them a couple of bucks a month as a comparison in non-open-source software. I would say basically if you took Bandcamp and Patreon and you put them together in an app, that would be the equivalent. On the pronunciation, we have all been calling it Merlot, like the wine. But apparently, because it is based on the Spanish word for Blackbird, it is Muleau. So we're wrong. But we're staying with the pronunciation. Speaker 2 But no longer. Merlot sounds excellent. I'm going to call that from now on in my ([Time 0:01:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/27513593-0711-49a0-b330-29a3d548c745)) - **Spotify's Profitability Challenge** - Spotify and similar streaming services are unprofitable and rely heavily on venture capital. - This reality pushed Mirlo to adopt a different, sustainable business model focusing on direct support. Transcript: Speaker 1 There was a good community at Residate. We realized that streaming software like Spotify, which is what resonate is trying to be, cannot actually run without venture capital money. So we're looking at other business models. One of them being more like band camper, Patreon, both of which are profit making businesses, Spotify still is not. So we thought we would try a different product that looks that works for resonate, what worked for Ampled, which also was a similar project and to go from ([Time 0:03:39](https://share.snipd.com/snip/754c16a2-39b7-45b7-8d82-2d4d75fa7c51)) - **Worker Co-op Structure Benefits** - Mirlo is structured as a worker co-op to empower those building the project. - It differs from Resonate's multi-stakeholder co-op which includes users and musicians on the board. Transcript: Speaker 1 Co-op. So a lot of us working on Merlot come from the Solidarity Automie Space, which is a space that focuses on building worker power and building spaces, whether housing or just like mutual Aid groups or businesses that are usually non-hierarchical, where everyone is empowered to make decisions. But basically, this idea of the people who are building the thing are in control of this thing, whether that's the coffee shop or otherwise. So that's kind of what devalued the ability for everyone to feel like they're empowered. What's different with Merlot from resonate was that resonate was a multi-stakeholder co-op, whereas Merlot is just a worker co-op. And a multi-stakeholder co-op means that you basically have a board which has representation from the people who use the service, listeners, the people who produce for the service, So musicians, and the people who make the service workers. So all those people would have an equal amount of seats on the board, and they make decisions about the direction of the service together. Merlot is not doing that mainly because we have a blog post on our website going into this, but there is a lot of work that goes into maintaining that kind of space that falls on the workers. ([Time 0:05:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/bebea018-52d8-47be-af13-fd4672502fb3)) - **Sustainability via Fees and Funding** - Mirlo sustains itself by taking a small fee from each transaction and accepting direct monthly contributions. - They also seek grants and run a Kickstarter to fund development beyond server costs. Transcript: Speaker 1 One of the reasons that we went with the Bandcamp slash Patreon model was that we did the math. We take a slice off of every single purchase. Say they sell something for $1 on Merlot, we get seven cents of that. To actually make that an amount of money that makes sense at scale, we would have to have hundreds of thousands of dollars moving through the platform. We won't get there for a while, probably. But because we're also this patronage site, we are able to get people to directly support us. We're dogfooding the website itself. We have a team page and people can pledge a contribution to Merlot and monthly contribution to Merlot. That way, right now, we have $295 coming in, which covers our server costs. It does not do much else but cover our server costs. It does not pay for any labor, etc. So, while we hope that that number will obviously increase as the servers become more popular, as more people get faith in it, we also want to guarantee that we are able to continue working On it, which means finding some other form of money. We're applying to grants, which is kind of a tricky space to be in because there aren't that many grants for businesses of this type. Usually, it's for an offer of profits if you're in the art space and stuff like that. But we're also doing a Kickstarter. We're hoping to raise $15,000 and go from there. ([Time 0:09:01](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7769e5c7-16a1-4529-b59b-81669a3b6f96)) - **Artist Ownership Complexity** - Defining artist membership as co-owners is complex and still being developed. - Mirlo plans to involve musicians in governance while considering their varied professional involvement. Transcript: Speaker 2 So I'm still unclear about this. What separates the artists from also being worker owners? Aren't they working like isn't that a profession as well? It is. Speaker 1 It is 100% a profession. That is something that we're working on in our operating agreements. A different co-ops have gone about this different ways. At Ampled, there was a threshold for if you have 10 people who supported you via Ampled, you became an artist owner. There was no professionalism. Basically, if you had uploaded music to resonate, you became an artist owner. At Artisans.coop, it's a point system and all work at Artisans.coop counts as a certain amount of contributions to the thing. If you meet a threshold, you become a worker owner. So we very much know that musicians who contribute music and put their faith in their platform are contributing work to Merlot as well because they are doing the labor. But they are also already doing that labor and Merlot is a way of distributing a thing. This is something we have to figure out. This is the part of where we're going to do the Exitutu community part. We will be bringing musicians into this decision making process. At the same time, the people who are contributing to our project. We have our three co-owners, but we also have a group of volunteers who for a variety of reasons are not yet co-owners might become in the future. Our All-Sume musicians, Alex is a trombonist. I just had a show on Saturday that I'm still sick from. But we also have people who make all of their money, their livelihood from music. We've hobbyists and people who are full-time musicians. It's tricky. It's definitely not a solved problem. ([Time 0:11:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/15b9366f-0919-4ca2-90c4-1c46dcce3565)) - **Building Trust for Inclusion** - Building trust takes time and is essential for productive conversations about co-op membership. - Mirlo focuses on inclusivity and compensating contributors to avoid privilege bias in ownership. Transcript: Speaker 2 My question was actually me just pointing out that this sounds really difficult. What sort of structures do you have in place to enable you to have these difficult conversations? Because that strikes me as symptomatic of a large number of open source projects, which have good intentions, good meeting, and they're trying to figure out the things like how do we Exit the community? How do we get this off the ground in terms of accounting? How do we ensure that people from different nationalities are able to pay or not pay or be paid or not be paid? So what does the process look like for you as someone who's been in the solidarity movement for a long time, someone who's been involved with social justice movements and cooperatives? How are you working to make sure those conversations are productive and meaningful for everyone involved? Speaker 1 It's slow, basically. It just takes a long time. I think from my experience, a lot of this is based on trust. And it takes a really long time to build trust with people. And it takes a long time to build trust with people up to a level where you don't know if you're going to get compensated, especially if you're also dealing with other constraints of just Living under the system that we're living in, where you have to pay rent, you have to buy food, you have to do all these things to just survive. All of that is it just takes time. It just takes time to get there. At the same time, we don't have time, right? Because as we run out of the pressures of rent, etc. Build on us, we might lose people who are currently contributing to the project. We could end up in a situation where we are able to run Merlot based on donations for years, pays the server costs, but the only people who are able to contribute to it are people who have Privilege and spare time to do so. And while that is probably still a net gain, it's not necessarily what we want to do, because we actually want to build a stronger community that is based in having conversations around Who's making decisions and those kinds of things. And yeah, time and money. ([Time 0:16:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7e413d3a-6bc4-4fcf-aa69-716c919ee5d2)) - **Effective Developer Onboarding** - Mirlo uses Discord for feedback and to onboard new developers with one-on-one support. - They recognize the need for formal contributing docs and code of conduct to improve engagement. Transcript: Speaker 1 Yeah, we have a discord server, basically, that people use to provide us with feedback. They use it to put ideas in it. And we also use it to help people get started with the project. When people join our discord server, they can self assign a developer role for interest in helping with that stuff. And based on that, I will DM them being like, Hey, you said you were interested in helping with this. Let me know if you have any problems with getting a project to put running. And so I guess we've offloaded some of the written documentation to a more like one on one conversation situation, which will sometimes happen in public or it'll sometimes happen in Private messages. We try to have a like generative conversation and we used to for a month or two have biweekly developer calls. We used to do just a great success at resonate. They quickly became like the most active space at resonate once we started doing those regularly. But this is again, a capacity issue. I have been the sole developer on the project for a while with help from L.K. Now, and with the focus on doing a lot more admin things, like operating agreements, fundraising, grant applications, starter stuff. It's just fallen by the wayside. Having said that, we do artists office hours. So you can book office hours as an artist with Jodi. And a lot of the folks we have weekly calls as well. And we have a monthly community call. But yeah, we should have a contributing dot MD and a code of conduct. ([Time 0:18:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5b414381-cece-4b4a-b767-b16680ba3401)) - **Building a Cooperative Music Internet** - Mirlo doesn't see projects like Bandcamp or Patreon as competitors but as part of a diverse, cooperative internet. - They aim to integrate with federated systems to enhance openness and community control. Transcript: Speaker 2 Yeah, I was going to ask, what's the competitive space for Murlou? I know that Bandcamp was sold from Epic Games to Songtrader, who then laid off half of its workforce. You said the Spotify is and making a ton of money. And they've also had their own ups and downs over the years. Why this project versus other projects? Why not just have a Patreon and just put your albums up on Patreon? The system's already there for that. Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, there is a moral element to that question for sure. And it's not always the most convenient. Like we're fairly close, minus bugs, et cetera. We're fairly close to feature parity with Bandcamp, which I think is amazing. There's a lot of things we're missing. But as far as like the things that I think 80% physicians use, we're there. What we don't do is merge and we don't do label support. But what we're noticing is that people care about being a co-op and people care about it being open source. And this is a big question, right? Like the question is like, what are you trying to do? And it could be that we're trying to compete with Bandcamp or that we're trying to compete with Spotify or that we're trying to compete with Patreon. But personally, while it would be cool to like create a co-op that is able to compete with these people on the footings of, you know, they had millions of dollars injected into them, I'm Not actually sure that's the internet that I want. And that's part of why Merlot is open source as well. We have the ambition of integrating with activity pub to be able to be part of the Fediverse. There's other groups as well, right? So there's Jam.coop is building a service that's fairly similar to Merlot. Patreon tape is a streaming service. Tone audio is also a streaming service. Amplal is doing a merge store. And these, none of us, and I think a majority of them don't see each other as, and I have to also mention Faircamp, which is a self-install static website. We're not competing with these groups. We're hoping to build an internet that is diverse and that has standards. And we get there by talking to people and we get there by being open and we get there being transparent in our intentions. And so that is all part of it. And yes, it appeals to a narrower demographic that will likely be our space. But we hope that by bringing in other people through the culture work that we're doing, we will be opening that space as well. And that's about user experience. That's about accessibility. ([Time 0:21:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d5ac6b1e-8086-43a2-9fac-11d8a2e6dbb5)) - **Kickstarter Rewards Strategy** - For their Kickstarter rewards, Mirlo plans a compilation album and screen-printed merchandise. - These help engage supporters and provide tangible returns for funding the platform. Transcript: Speaker 2 You mentioned to me yesterday that you might have to print like 200 shirts. So tell me how you're not doing merge when you're also doing a Kickstarter. What's that about? Speaker 1 Yeah. So we're doing a Kickstarter. And as part of the Kickstarter, usually you have reward tiers where people essentially commit to buying one of your products. Merlot is already built. It's up and running. 200 artists use it. We have about $500 a month moving through the platform. So it's there. We don't really have a very concrete like for our initial thing. Like we're basically just trying to meet the first, the calculation that we did was to the end of 2024 of operating costs, which includes travel, etc. But we want to give people some things for her time. The first tier is compilation album, which I think is the most on brand thing that we'll do. But also I do screen printing for my mutual aid group. I do button making. And those were just things that we were like, well, we'll throw those in as well. We'll just make a cute design or something like that or just a logo and t-shirt and we'll make those. It would make a lot of sense for us to implement the merge features that we have threatened to implement on our website so that we can sell this merge that we're making for Merlot on our Website. And physicians could also sell actual records and t-shirts and stuff like that to fans, which is a great way for people to make money currently in the creator economy. ([Time 0:23:52](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b6120d46-c2b9-4c9b-80fe-107dcf22e834))