https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirlo
(don't know why the preview isn't working, weird)
From the outset we’re focusing on our “exit to community,” where those who contribute to the platform will have a say in how it is run and managed. We guarantee that their livelihoods will not be part of a corporate buyout. Drawing on our deep shared experience with mutual aid organizing and collective self-governance models, as well as our developers’ skills in building and maintaining open source software, we are excited for Mirlo to be a space where people gather to share music and support musicians!
Took some time to set up an account for the band and add all of our music to it and have some thoughts about the process.
The experience felt a lot like using Bandcamp, with some minor quirks and caveats all of which are forgivable for a small team seeking funding.
Here are some of them which might help others setting up their page:
- banner images are backgrounds instead of headers but this isn't clearly explained
- track ordering drag and drop isn't very intuitive
- Uploading album art and details on a page doesn't save if you upload tracks and hit publish. You have to save the draft first or the album goes up without a name or cover.
Again, these are forgivable for a tiny startup - the only real downside I see is that they're currently using Stripe as their payment processor, and it's on you personally to set up the integration.
While this generally hasn't been a problem for music, Stripe's (to put it lightly) puritanical stances have been the detriment of artists and sex workers for years and I do not trust them. I know Cohost uses Stripe for plus subscriptions (and has voiced an interest in changing this I believe), but as an individual artist or a band you'd be responsible for your content and all it would take is Stripe deciding your music (or even album art?) is in violation of ToS and your Mirlo would be dead in the water. This is obviously an extreme example and my own bias against whorephobic capitalists is shining through but I wanted to be as transparent as possible.
That said - they have a few things going for them that bandcamp doesn't
- Not owned by Songtradr
- They take a 7% cut instead of Bandcamp's 15/10 (Stripe adds a 3%ish amount but bandcamp's card processes add as well, so net takehome with Mirlo would be higher, excluding Bandcamp Friday of course)
- Goal of creating a self-sustaining, community-run platform. This could go either way but I'm putting it in the positive camp.
- Mirlo means blackbird en español and I am both a bird fan and a chicano so this feels catered to me, personally
Summary?
I don't know what happens if the kickstarter fails. I don't know what happens if it succeeds. The platform they're pitching sounds great, and mulder's poster dot jpg but who knows, right?
As with all webbed sites where you upload content, their ToS has what some detractors would panic and call a scary clause about 'the worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free' right to use the stuff you upload, but as people have said in the past - this is how user generated content exists online. The difference between the Mirlo ToS and Cohosts in this instance are pretty slim, with the exception of a paragraph about how if they use your content for commercialisation (ads, promo, etc) they have the right to edit it. I'm not wild on that - but the implication is 'we need a 10 second clip of your song for an ad' and not 'we're going to autotune you for a tiktok vid promoting our service' though the latter would fall into scope. I don't know - I really don't wanna fearmonger this shit.
