Third Nature has chosen to be a co-operative as a social contract with artists and contributors alike - to serve its members, not profit. For us, cooperation doesn’t just mean playing nice, or sitting in circles and only making consensus-based decisions. It means that we take our commitment to aligning the interests of artists, workers, and the organisation at large seriously - and embedded it within our organisational structure.
When the label is owned by its artists and contributors, not venture capitalists, artist and worker interests are aligned with the company.
Compared to alternative structures, co-operatives can benefit from having leaner startup costs, lower chances of failure, being more resilient, having higher levels of productivity, and more. Co-ops have many advantages over a standard corporate structure - though there are usually more barriers to starting them.
We are currently living in one of the greatest transfers of wealth in world history. Artists are generating value for organisations, yet the economic rewards disproportionately go to a small group of founders and investors, and artists do not have a voice in how these companies do business. This leaves content creators of all kinds behind - especially musicians.
Even if you don’t notice it, cooperatives are all around us. Not every co-op you encounter, use, or do business with may announce that they are a co-op.
There is an assumption that co-operatives are smaller or old fashioned enterprises. This isn’t true. There are many co-ops with hundreds of millions - or billions of £££ in revenue each year.
Being a co-op means we have the opportunity to measure our success outside of a wealth-obsessed lens and focus on what is important to us. We can reject win-or-lose models of success, and instead, measure our success based on sustainability, values, and the change we seek to make. Let’s redefine the concept of value together to create a new measure of success.