Hi! I'm one of the co-owners of Mirlo and had to wait to get approved to join before I could reply :P
" Music they buy is downloadable and can be listened to on the platform."
Yeah, I guess we can say "Music they buy is downloadable DRM-free, and can also be listened to on the platform". I've edited the Kickstarter page to reflect this
I've thought about trying to make music for game projects or for fun or need, what would the "collectively owned and managed" part of mirlo look like for me?
Mirlo is currently owned by a worker co-op that manages its day to day operations. As part of our operating agreements we're building out pathways for others to get involved in co-managing the co-op with us, and we'll eventually turn this into an "exit to community". We're not sure yet on what that looks like, but you can see some of our current thoughts on that here https://mirlo.space/team/posts/26/
Is your base funding goal actually enough to get the project off the ground? I love the idea of community-focused platforms like this, but that goal seems very low.
You're right! It's enough to pay for basic costs of running the project (basic things like legal fees, outreach and promotion, server costs), but unfortunately does not include paying our worker-owners. Our stretch goals as outlined do address that somewhat, but it's still not really accounted for. Also, it's a number we felt like pushed the upper limit of what we thought we might be able to raise!
How much experience does your team have with music production/distribution/sales? I saw one of your co-operative founders listed with experience as a musician on your ks page. I've not worked anywhere around art distribution platforms myself, but I do think I know that it's critically important to understand the needs of your clients and customers (capitalism blecch) when designing/developing software and systems.
We've been working really closely alongside people who make their living from selling music and have a lot of experience in the online co-op music distribution space.
Is this more of a centralized co-op platform like cohost or being approached with decentralization/instancing in mind? (not talking about crypto/"web3" nonsense here, that stuff is the worst)
Right now we're largely centralized, but we're hoping to use existing standards (like ActivityPub) and maybe construct new ones to allow for a form of syndication or federation. We're still thinking about that! Anyone can take our code and (expensively, tbh) run it on their own servers if they wanted to. There's some open tickets on our GitHub about ActivityPub and people bring it up regularly in our discord.
Hope that helps, lmk if you have more questions!