My short response to recent developments is: music communities might do well to consider scene wealth fund models for travel, visas, recording time, journalism. The great leap in the past decade or so has been the ability for anyone to make, publish and receive music files. Outside of the occasional, over referenced, examples, that isn't sufficient to make a career. Platforms that made this possible have also played a part in eroding the institutions that actually make careers for people. Intermediaries like labels, mixing engineers, producers, smaller promoters, journos etc who invest to make interdependent, viable, paths to a career in art. We wouldn't be where we are without 1)small promoters taking a chance on us 2)small labels investing in us 3)engineers who had better gear than us 4) journos who had time to dig 5)day jobs that let us go play shows where we lost money 6)lucky passports that let us travel These are just some examples of what gets omitted in the independence nonsense narrative favoured by platforms. These are the things you don't understand the essential importance of until you have benefitted from them as a working artist. So yeah, I think the case for scene wealth funds is strong, to maintain the essential stuff that is easily glossed over but is arguably *the* fundamental difference between a culture of atomised people throwing files at each other, and a scene and community with legs. I also think that the case for scene wealth funds, in various different configurations, is something that you can far easier court financial support for than paying for those files we throw around so much. It encourages membership, pride, interdependence. Posi stuff. One can imagine a network of scene wealth funds, regulated so as not to concentrate too much wealth in any one location, adding new node funds to the network in places that need them. WAY more exciting/ internationalist a prospect than buying mp3s from ppl in media centers. A leaner/more efficient example of the kindof networks the indies created, that were also eroded when people took the individualist independent part too seriously and jettisoned the rest. An internationalist, interdependent network that takes care of all the stuff platforms omit. I also think that this kind of gesture is exactly the kind of proposition scenes can put pressure on platforms to fund with no curatorial say. Consider it a scene tax. If Apple were to stump up cash to seed these developments, prioritise them and pull music from elsewhere. At the end of the day, these streaming platforms need for music to be developing to keep people interested in music. They have benefitted from the interdependent networks too, and got those benefits cheap. [#Music](/relevant/new/Music) [#Interdependence](/relevant/new/Interdependence)