Resonate effectively in involuntary dissolution

In 2018 the Resonate board voted to hold a €20K reserve in the event of needing to wind down. For years we maintained that reserve, never dipping below that amount.

A few months ago we received notice that a service provider had accidentally failed to bill us for seven years of service. The amount of those unpaid invoices (which were going to be escalated to a collections agency if left unpaid) took us well below that 20K threshold.

To my mind this acts as a form of involuntary dissolution. This is also owing to having no clear plan of long-term self-sufficiency and lack of dedicated, inspired support from either the board or the community.

With this in mind I’ve (slowly) started initiating the wind-down of the co-op.

The language in the Resonate Rulebook is vague when it comes to involuntary dissolution. Voluntary dissolution requires a majority vote in a special election, but given the lack of activity and/or interest I wonder if that is even necessary.

The first major steps are to get past tax audits and accounts up to date, as we are not able to legally shut down until that is done. I have engaged an accountant/auditor in Ireland to help with that process.

If anyone has questions or concerns they are welcome to post below.

Do you have the ability to add a download option as part of the wind-down? I would like to be able to download the tracks I’ve purchased, and I imagine that will be a common request.

I’m working on a system which is able to render json and csv for the list of owned tracks, plays history as listener and earnings report as creator.
We can indeed offer a download option as part of this system. I need some more time to work on this though.

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@peter this is sad but also not unexpected. Thanks for still being here and keeping an eye on these kinds of things.

Not to make more work, but that seems border line like it would be illegal. I did a quick search and it sounds like the statute of limitations on unsent invoices is 3 years if this is for the servers in germany. Would need some verification on that though.

What is borderline illegal?

charging resonate 7 years worth of invoices in one go. like i think they could just charge resonate 3 years worth. but again, that would require asking a lawyer wherever the service provider is based.