What does "artists owning the platform" actually mean?

It means what it means very literally: artist-members are legal owners of the platform, alongside the workers who help build and maintain it, and can bring forth proposals for the platform to adopt in the scope of anything they want: from what should be worked on/developed next, to business decisions about things like platform fees, to even the rules about how the platform operates as an entity/organization.

And at the end of the day, when it's time to split the surplus (the difference between Revenue, what was earned, and Expenses, what was spent. Non-coops call this "profit"), artists get their fair share of the money directly as income!

It's a company that workers and artists own, democratically, through a consent-based system, in a one-member one-vote manner (meaning, artist votes aren't worth any less than worker votes, and vice-versa).

To read more about our membership structure and what all this looks like, please refer to our Membership page.