Thanks Angus.
I am wary of including the featured playlist competition in the newsletter.
I discussed this with @richjensen last night and Iām going to try to share some of my concerns with you nowā¦
A competition is setting a precedent, we havenāt communicated via newsletter in years and as a community based on cooperation, inclusivity, diversity etc it feels completely off to be promoting a competition. What does that say about who we are? That we are actively forging a path with āwinnersā and therefore ālosersā in music.
In general, the idea of competitions to highlight music is ethically wrong - art is not a competition - and what I understood to be the complete antithesis of what we want to build as both a platform and community. Itās written in our manifesto that has already been agreed by the board.
From a marketing and communication viewpointā¦ It also feels too basic - while I appreciate it has been decided and will go ahead as a first trial, to highlight it in the newsletter or our socials is something I am strongly against. I would hope that this quickly evolves into something more thoughtful and in keeping with our ideals.
I would like to be involved in the conversation about how we can creatively do better - this is a conversation that involves both tech, community, marketing/comms/story - how will the playlists be highlighted and presented long term, what does collective patronage look like and how can we achieve this within resonate and the music ecosystem, how can we level the playing field for all, how can we elevate the unheard or ignored, how do we encourage discovery and participation in new scenes, right up to the core issue of what is the value of music and art. etc.
Itās the most exciting and vital problem to solve - where we can take the best of tech and the best of human discovery. We can already see examples of this being done well - at bandcamp for instance (where they also do it badly in the form of bandcamp daily but still better than all the other DSPs), and from these starting points we can probably do even better as we are intentionally building to be ethical, fair, inclusive, just etcā¦
I saw from the thread that one of the reasons that was decided to do a competition is to ārewardā members - but they are already being rewarded by being a part of the coop! Transparency, participation, ownership, governance are the rewards.
If we want to incentivise people to engage and share, it has to be more complicated, deeper and meaningful than a competition or picking favourites. And to highlight a single playlist is, again, against our own manifesto.
I can suggest a quick fix - rather than it being a competition for any playlist, it could be made into a discovery playlist. A discovery playlist would be made entirely of music the curator has discovered on resonate, no friends or relatives, sounds outside their comfort zone or regular listening habits that they want to share with the community. Something like this would slightly better fit our ideals. It would be created with care and intention to push discovery and exploration - therefore in keeping with our values.
I donāt expect that to be done now, and honestly we can probably do even better - but criticism delivered without proposed solutions or steps forward is obviously unhelpful!
I am happy to share this on the main thread - but perhaps you, rich, @Hakanto @brndnkng could discuss further first?
Melissa