Some Relevant Reading / Research
White Supremacy and Organizational Culture
- Aorta's Uprooting White Supremacy Training. A number of us have attended this workshop and highly recommend others to do so. Its focus on tackling structurelessness and disempowerment provide insights into what works and doesn't work for organizations that are hoping to build liberated spaces for a diverse group of participants.
- Dismantling White Culture at Resonate Series. Some of us found our way here from our experiences at Resonate, and participated in this reading series started by community leads at the co-op. The series was a space for discussion and analysis around white culture and white supremacy as it exists in online spaces, its intersection with volunteer culture and volunteerism, and our dominant society's tendency to exclude marginilized groups from decision making processes.
The Music Industry
- Steve Albini's The Problem with Music Steve Albini’s iconic music industry takedown explains how record labels use A&R flaks and impenetrable contracts to screw artists while raking in millions
- Musicians Can and Should Organize to Improve Their Pay and Working Conditions and When Musicians went on Strike, and Won are both by Joey La Neve DeFrancesco and get at some crucial labor history for musicians.
- The Soul-Sucking Reality of Touring by Taja Cheek, Chelsea Pachito, Matana Roberts, & Tasha
Streaming And Digital Sales
Whether we like it or not, music streaming is a consumer favorite. But it's not profitable, it's environmentally disastrous, and it's not great for musicians.
- Inside the fight to fix streaming
- This is what you'll pay for, paired with the new Drake & The Weeknd based AI generated song as an insight into the future of streaming and music production generally, and what we'll be paying for on our streaming platforms.
- Streaming's endgame
- Bandcamp: the chaos bazaar, followed by how much money do people make on bandcamp
- Impact of music streaming adopting the User Centric Model
Co-ops ("platform" and not).
It's debatable whether there is such a thing as a "platform co-op." There are co-ops, and some of them might produce digital products. Some of them might have multi-stakeholder structures but these models aren't novel to the internet age.
- The Slow Demise of Loconomics. An interview with the lead developer at Loconomics, giving insights into what worked, what didn't work, and an analysis of why.
- The Untold Story of Evergreen Cooperatives. Evergreen Cooperatives gets held up as a model of a potential working business model for co-operatives, tying the cooperative structure to "eds and meds" anchor institutions. However, the story of its failure is not as clear cut as its leadership would like you to believe, and has a lot to do with how co-ops are idealized and romanticized.
Art World Etc
Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber's "Another Art World":
- Part 1: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity. The art world is predicated on the romantic ideas that 1) everyone can be an artist and 2) not everyone can be an artist. And 2 will always win over 1.
- Part 2: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value
- Part 3: Policing and Symbolic Order. Really interesting comparison between defund the police and defund the art world.
- Grant Funding is broken here's how to fix it. A reflexion on the limits and flaws of grant funding institutions, and considerations about how to remedy them by approaching the concept of "trust" differently with regards to how to pick grant recipients.
Chapter 6: My Studio is the World of Sarah Jaffe's Work Won't Love You Back.
Books
- Art & Labor The arts and crafts movement from around the turn of the 19th to 20th century was full of utopian visioning around artists and craftsmen, inspired by socialist theorists. Its legacy is more one of middle class communities that escaped the pressures of capitalism for very short periods of time.
- Artpolitik: Social Anarchist Aesthetics in an Age of Fragmentation A history of artistic tendencies (modernism, avant-garde, postmodernism) and how they intersect with social movements, the politics of their era, and what they meant for the political visions of their participants.
- Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution
- Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis