Layer 08 · Strength in numbers
One channel with fifty artists beats fifty channels with one artist. The Pool runs shared channels and shared placements, and pays its members by rules everyone can read before they join. on the horizon
The model exists
Two working bodies already do what the Pool will do, in other art forms and other countries. Both are owned by their members, and both run on one member, one vote.
Every month it takes half of all its revenue and splits it equally among its roughly 30 members. Not weighted by fame or stream counts: the same share for each member, every month, by a rule everyone joined under.
Pays its artists 50 to 75 per cent royalties (the maker's share each time a work sells), plus a year-end share of the profits weighted by what each artist earned across the year.
The share of revenue that reaches the makers, in the two working examples.
The legal shape for this in Australia is a distributing co-operative (the standard legal form that lets a member body lawfully share money with its members). Not a new invention; a form that already exists, put to work for music.
Where the money comes from
The biggest video platform pays around 55 per cent of the advertising revenue on standard videos: for every dollar an ad earns on a video, about 55 cents goes to the channel that posted it. A shared channel collects that for the whole membership.
Shared storefronts (one shop page selling many members' work), so a listener who came for one artist can walk out with three, and each sale flows back through the published split.
Member shows run with fair-fee ticketing (booking fees kept low and shown up front), so the door money goes to the night and the people on stage rather than the ticketing company.
Why it waits its turn
Pooled channels (one channel carrying many artists' work) and machine-made content sit under platform rules that are still being confirmed. Those rules are being checked before the first dollar moves, because a pool that gets its channel closed a month in has paid nobody and wasted the work members put into it.
So this layer arrives after the mark, the chart and the terms work, not alongside them. The first pilot, when it comes: one shared visual channel carrying member releases. on the horizon
The principle as mechanism
"Fair" is a word; a working pool needs machinery. Three parts, in order:
Who gets what, and how it is worked out, is published before the first payment is made. Anyone thinking of joining reads the rules before they join, not after.
Nobody adjusts the split quietly. A proposed change is put to the members, one member, one vote, the same way the working co-operatives already run.
What came in, what went out, and what each rule paid: members can see it. The numbers do the reassuring, so nobody has to.
Where it fits
The Pool is the last layer to switch on and the reason the others exist: the mark says how the work was made, the chart and the stages give it an audience, and the pool turns that audience into shared income under rules everyone signed up to.
See how the eight layers fit together or walk the maker's path.