"Professionalize", "MDP", "Proficient" Objective - What's in the name

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Context : There was a long debate during the Roadmap Session 4 about how to name a key target objective for the Resonate Platform as part of our mission to define “strategic goals” (here refered to as OKRs “Objectives with Key Results”).

I’m first offering a definition for the objective itself :

“The objective is to make the Resonate Platfrom suitable, inviting and efficient for Professionals looking to join us (here defined as people and companies already being able to sustain themselves by working within the music industry’s established structures), by meeting the minimum requirement for their specific ways to work both in in legal terms and in terms of infrastructure.”

We’ve proposed to call this broad goal :

  • Professionalize the platform
  • Platform proficiency
  • Minimum Diserable Product (Platform?)
  • Establish Baseline Performance

I think, regardless of the name we choose, the fundamentals of this specific goal to me is the audience it’s trying to adress : We want to be a serious offering for people who are used to work with similarly serious services, which in “professional people terms” means : not wasting their time, fullfilling legal requirements, fitting with pre-existing standardized workflows, a certain extent of automated features etc.

While this doesn’t mean the result of this objective can’t and won’t also benefit just about anyone using our tools in the end, the reason it’s a separate issue is because the “minimum level of requirements” threshold to onboard professionnals is considered higher and more specific than to onboard single indie creators.

I think this summarizes this “goal” well enough to allow some room to try to find the best phrasing this community wants but if people think I somehow misinterpreted the goal feel free to say so.

In the end my personnal opinion is we could mix some of the above propositions :

“Platform proficiency for industry professionals”

“MDP for onboarding Professionals”

“Baseline Performance for onboarding Professionals”

Something like that. But I’m not extremely invested in any particular phrasing as long as we agree on the definition and I encourage anyone to coin a better term if they feel like it.

PS: tagging @melis_tailored @sganesh @SueJ @jackhajb @richjensen since I remember most of you having some thoughts on the matter.

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‘Capability building’

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Thanks @LLK

My understanding of this point is that this is about delivering a professional product and service - the conjoining of EXPECTATION & REALITY.

The product is a functioning DSP (digital streaming platform/digital service provider) that meets… (as outlined by above)

Legal fulfilment, product fulfilment, basics expected by users (independent artists/labels/distributors currently not having their expectations met), standardised workflows including automation of basics… such as artist/label verification, catalogue onboarding, metadata handling, uploads - individual and bulk, reporting & payments; a backend “dashboard” for our artists/labels/distributors that gives transparency and agency, then things expected by listeners incl. an app.

This “professional” refers to the expectation laid on the platform itself to be a professional or proficient DSP, not on the people using it to be professionals. However, if using “professional” will lead to eg. self-releasing artists feeling excluded, we need to lose it.

I support “proficient platform” or “minimum desirable platform product”

What is key - we are talking about the Resonate platform | Resonate DSP here. Our product and our offering as a platform/DSP, not our community or co-op or listeners. In this, it’s essential to be clear.

I find “capability building” too general and vague.
While “Platform proficiency for industry professionals”
“MDP for onboarding Professionals”
“Baseline Performance for onboarding Professionals”
are all misleading. This isn’t FOR professionals, it’s TO BE professional.

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Alright, I think that’s the part of where my personnal understanding of “being professional” tricked my vision a little.

I view “being professional” as “fullfilling the requirements established by the entities and people who work in the music industry (which is my only definition of “professional”, so that’d be distributors, big indie labels, PROs, legal rights attorneys etc.)” so to me it was full circle between “being a platform that’s suitable for professionals” AND “being a professional platform”.

My view was that if we only cattered to amateurs and solo indie artists etc. we didn’t have to go through the hassle of a lot of things because we could just say stuff like “only post music that’s not registered with P.R.Os” or things like that, where you can build a pretty platform that “feels professional” enough from the perspective of an amateur just looking for a place to put his songs but isn’t, in fact, professional for people working within an industry with a lot of pre-requisites, already established structures, varying legislations etc. (which I feel is where we’re at right : good for a layperson without too much ties to the industry, not prepared for the bigger player excluding Majors who we are not interested in getting on board).

So yeah, that was my vision of it and that’s why I phrased it that way, to me the people who will define the concept “Resonate IS professional” are… professionals. The others will just judge if we’re efficient at providing the service they’re looking for which in my view is different from “being pro” it’s just providing a good service (a lot of good services are provided by entirely non-professional, non law-abiding, non standardized-infrastructure-respecting platforms).

Now this being said, I’m fine with :

“Platform Proficiency” or @sganesh 's “Minimum desirable platform product” since I think they sort-of encompass what I just mentionned above, if anyone has anything else to mention, we could just put those to up to a vote ?

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Building the most professional platform is the point. It doesn’t matter whether it’s for people who consider themselves professional or not. We should be doing it for ourselves - to be the best, most revolutionary platform/DSP.

Bau keine scheiße - as the German saying goes.

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I 100% agree with that, my point was rather that the persons most suited to know if it’s professional or not are those who know the various intricacies of the business side of the art world (because they can afford to live off of it and/or because their job IS to know these intracacies), and they have very complex needs, so I’d like to think that if you can catter to those high demands, then you can catter to the simpler needs of the “non-professional” ones as well.

About that my personnal view actually would be for us to never limitate the professional tools to the professional contributors (à la Spotify, where every feature they offer seems locked behind a specific layer of gatekeeping to the point sometimes you don’t even know how you could ever access it) and make them available to all with no regard for “legitimacy” or “a special relationship” or “premimum membership” or whatever to the platform, so that the tools we build for pros are all accessible to newcomers as well, even if we consider that they don’t need it.

Should we put “Platform Proficiency” and “Minimum Desirable Platform Product” up to a vote btw? What do you think @melis_tailored @Hakanto or anyone else?

That’d be great to put this behind us for the time being and focus on key metrics !

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agreed @LLK 100%

i support Minimum Desirable Platform Product

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I agree with this concern, and suggest that “accessibility for all artists (not just ‘industry professionals’)” be considered as a counter-balancing OKR to this one (compliance with legal requirements and industry expectations).

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Exactly, we build the best platform, according to our manifesto. If we build in that manner - we build not only the best product, one that works for “professionals”, but also for the artist/music community itself, which is currently not catered to by a tech and major label industry that builds for their own profit and power, rather than the security and sustainability of artists careers and grassroots scenes (unless they plan to extract capital from them etc)

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I’m a bit late to this and I don’t think it should change the objectives or thinking but I was doing a lot of reading around DIY and amateurism last year.

In terms of ‘professional’ I thought of this - Gerry Beegan, Paul Atkinson, Professionalism, Amateurism and the Boundaries of Design, Journal of Design History , Volume 21, Issue 4, Winter 2008, Pages 305–313, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epn037

It’s not free if you don’t have a login but I can share privately if anyone wanted.

The term ‘profession’ originally referred to a public statement or vow, and it is only in the sixteenth century that it was used to describe a range of upper class work, principally the practice of law, medicine and divinity. By the nineteenth century, other forms of endeavour sought the social and economic status enjoyed by these elite professions. Nonetheless, the boundaries of the three established professions had been somewhat hazy, as medicine, law and the Church were not closely regulated and had no systematic training. Professional status had generally depended on a liberal university education followed by an apprenticeship that required economic support from family or a patron. Gradually these, and newer fields such as engineering and pharmacy, developed specialist graduate and professional schools and systems of licensing and legal regulation that controlled entry and limited competition. Professionalization acts as a system of exclusion by setting up criteria that, intentionally or unintentionally, bar individuals and groups on the basis of money, class, ethnicity and gender. In broad terms, professionalization in Europe and the USA became a means of creating business networks and social arenas that were largely middle class, white and male, maintaining the gentlemanly hierarchies characteristic of divinity, law and medicine.

(my emphasis in bold)

I don’t have a better term for what we’re talking about though. Maybe it’s a case (for the future or other discussions, again, I don’t think this should derail the objectives) of framing things more about ‘working with existing ecosystems that musicians and labels rely upon for their work’?

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