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One of the more interesting things in Music Australia's 2025 Listening In research is what it reveals about young Australians: they want local music, feel pride in it, and are largely failing to find it on the platforms they use every day.
Under-25s and 25-34s are the cohort most fluent in streaming mechanics, most likely to pay for music despite genuine cost-of-living pressure, and most willing to subscribe to multiple services when one doesn't serve their needs.
The problem is that discovering Australian music on platforms designed for global recommendation requires active effort most listeners don't sustain. The algorithm hasn't been trained to care where you live.
The Pack closes that gap - not as a nationalist project, but because a platform that surfaces local music is genuinely more useful to a local listener. If you know young music lovers, arts educators, or anyone in the youth cultural sector — I'd love your help sharing this.
One of the more interesting things in Music Australia's 2025 Listening In research is what it reveals about young Australians: they want local music, feel pride in it, and are largely failing to find it on the platforms they use every day.
Under-25s and 25-34s are the cohort most fluent in streaming mechanics, most likely to pay for music despite genuine cost-of-living pressure, and most willing to subscribe to multiple services when one doesn't serve their needs.
The problem is that discovering Australian music on platforms designed for global recommendation requires active effort most listeners don't sustain. The algorithm hasn't been trained to care where you live.
The Pack closes that gap - not as a nationalist project, but because a platform that surfaces local music is genuinely more useful to a local listener. If you know young music lovers, arts educators, or anyone in the youth cultural sector — I'd love your help sharing this.
The cooperative model is not new. The Rochdale Pioneers established the first modern consumer cooperative in 1844, in response to exploitative pricing by mill owners. The context maps onto the streaming conversation with uncomfortable precision.
The cooperative sector globally represents $2.5 trillion in combined turnover and supports the livelihoods of around one billion people. Mondragon employs over 70,000 people and generates €11 billion in annual revenue alone. The argument that cooperatives are charming but unscalable doesn't survive contact with the evidence.
The reason platform cooperatives are rare in the tech sector isn't that cooperative principles are incompatible with digital platforms. It's that venture capital requires a return structure that is fundamentally incompatible with cooperative ownership - and so the funding infrastructure for technology has actively selected against this model for decades.
The Pack started with a structural question: what would it look like if the distribution infrastructure were owned by the people whose work it distributes? Not managed on their behalf by a company whose interests might or might not align with theirs. Owned by them. Governed by them.
New blog on cooperative history, platform cooperativism, and why your grandmother's ethics still hold up in the digital age.
#CooperativeEconomics #MusicIndustry #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #EthicalBusiness #MusicianOwned #FutureOfMusic
The Pack is something different - it's a patron-powered music streaming service that's actually forging mutually beneficial, direct, and transparent connections between local businesses, local listeners, and local musicians. With the radical notion that maybe, just maybe, we can create a sustainable
The music streaming industry presents itself as a modern marvel of digital convenience. And it is that. But beneath the surface lies a system that mirrors the worst aspects of platform capitalism - without even the trickle.
The streaming model concentrates revenue at the top of the distribution curve, extracts value from the workers who generate it, and redistributes that value to shareholders who contribute capital but not creative labour. Cooperatives don't fix this by being 'nicer'. They fix it by changing who owns the infrastructure and who makes the decisions about how it operates. This is the oldest insight of the cooperative tradition. It still holds.
The Pack was built on the premise that the antidote to extractive platform capitalism isn't a better-designed version of the same thing. It's a different model with a different ownership structure and different answers to the question of whose interests the platform was built to serve.
👉https://www.packmusic.au/blog/brokenindustry
#MusicIndustry #CooperativeModel #IndependentMusic #ThePackMusic #EthicalBusiness #MusicianOwned #StreamingRoyalties
Sofia Jade
Mass Axis
@packmusic
World news | The Guardian
Technology | The Guardian US
