While news has perhaps the most immediate potential to co-operatize against the giants, co-ops in other culture industries are also managing to carve out niches in the gaps left by Big Business in ways that hint at a different kind of future. Scholar-activist Trebor Scholz argues that platform cooperativism’s importance comes less from destroying “the dark overlords” and more from “writing over them in people’s minds, incorporating different ownership models, and then inserting them back into the mainstream.”20 Liz Pelly has a similar view. In the context of music, she calls alternative distribution means “protest platforms,” arguing that “the means through which music is created and distributed carries as much political weight as the content of the songs—by subverting the status quo, making their own platforms, and creating alternative worlds.”21

There’s potential for grander-scale initiatives too—like entertainment lawyer Henderson Cole’s radical proposal for an American Music Library. He envisages this as a government-financed digital public music library, which, like a public library for books, could be accessed by any American for free. Artists and composers would opt in by uploading their music and their labels and publishers would be barred from stopping them. As Pelly points out, “we don’t currently conceptualize universal access to music as a public good, to be managed in the public interest with public funding. We should.”

In Cole’s vision, a music library could also have a preservation role, keeping copies of uploaded music for future generations. But what he is perhaps most excited about is the possibility of a new royalty system that bypasses the insane complexity and wastefulness of the one we have now.