76 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
76 lines
4.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Resonate: A Music Platform Where Listening Leads to Owning"
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description: "Musicians and fans built a streaming cooperative with a radical idea: stream a song enough times, and you own it"
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summary: What if streaming could be fair for artists? Resonate's cooperative model lets musicians earn real money while listeners gradually own the music they love. Stream a song nine times, and it's yours forever.
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date: 2026-01-04
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tags: ["case-study", "cooperative", "music", "streaming", "artist-owned"]
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categories: ["Creative Communities"]
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weight: 6
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featureImageCaption: "Photo by [Yvette de Wit](https://unsplash.com/@yvette_design) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/NYrVisodQ2M) (Unsplash License)"
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---
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## What They Needed
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Music streaming broke the old music industry—but it didn't fix it. Artists now earn fractions of a penny per stream. A song needs millions of plays to generate meaningful income. The platforms capture most of the value while musicians struggle.
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A group of musicians, technologists, and music lovers asked: what if streaming could be fair? What if listeners could actually own the music they love? What if the platform belonged to the people who use it?
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## What They Built
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They created **[Resonate](https://resonate.coop/coop/)**—a music streaming cooperative with a model they call "stream to own."
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Here's how it works:
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- **First plays are cheap.** The first time you stream a song, it costs a fraction of a cent.
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- **Repeated plays cost more.** Each subsequent play costs a bit more.
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- **Nine plays = ownership.** After streaming a song nine times, you've paid roughly the cost of buying it—and now you own it. Stream it forever, download it, it's yours.
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The economics work out to roughly the same as buying a track, but spread across your listening. Songs you try once cost almost nothing. Songs you love, you end up owning.
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And the platform itself is a cooperative:
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- **Artists are members** with governance rights
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- **Listeners can be members** too
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- **Decisions are democratic**
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- **Built on open source** technology
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## What Happened
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Resonate has been building since 2016, with thousands of artists and listeners participating in the cooperative.
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**What artists say:**
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> "I earn more per play than on any other streaming platform. It's not even close."
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> "The stream-to-own model means fans who really love my music actually pay for it, while casual listeners can still discover me."
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> "I'm not just uploading to a platform. I'm a member of a cooperative that I help govern."
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**What listeners say:**
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> "I love that my listening actually leads to owning. It feels like my plays mean something."
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> "The music discovery is different—it's curated by the community, not an algorithm trying to keep me hooked."
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## What They Learned
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**Aligned incentives change everything.** When the platform is owned by artists and listeners together, there's no third party extracting value. The platform's success *is* the community's success.
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**Stream-to-own respects how people actually listen.** Most songs you hear once or twice. A few become favorites you play hundreds of times. Stream-to-own prices accordingly—cheap discovery, fair compensation for the music you love.
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**Building a cooperative is slower than raising venture capital.** Resonate hasn't grown as fast as VC-backed competitors. But it's building something sustainable, owned by its community, not beholden to investors demanding growth at any cost.
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**Open source enables trust.** Artists can see exactly how the platform works. There's no black-box algorithm deciding who gets promoted. Transparency is built into the technology.
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## What This Means for You
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If you're a musician, you don't have to accept streaming economics that pay fractions of pennies. Alternatives exist.
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If you're a music lover, you can choose where your money goes. Platforms owned by artists and listeners operate differently than platforms owned by investors.
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And if you're part of any creative community—musicians, writers, filmmakers, podcasters—the cooperative model is adaptable. The principles Resonate developed could apply to other forms of creative work.
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**Learn more:** [resonate.coop](https://resonate.coop)
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---
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*Streaming doesn't have to mean artists earn nothing and listeners own nothing. Resonate imagined a different deal—and built it.*
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