Co-ops are a very flexible and successful business structure. For example, people in the northeastern US probably know of Cabot Cheddar. This is part of the Agri-Mark co-op, which does something like $1 billion in annual business and employs about 1,000 people.

Agri-Mark is a "producer co-op," which means that it's owned by dairy farms. There are also very successful "consumer co-ops," as well as "worker co-ops."

There are many nice things about co-ops:

- They can be economically competitive.

- They're democratically run. (Larger ones often elect a board and/or appoint management.)

- They're strictly voluntary associations.

There are also reasons why you don't see more co-operatives:

- They don't have huge incentives to scale. There are plenty of amazing grocery co-ops, for example, that have one or two excellent stores but no desire to expand.

- They raise capital through their members. Details vary, but they tend to scale more like bootstrapped businesses than startups.

But a musicians' producer co-op could absolutely build something like Bandcamp. It would be a lot of work, and it would require some genuine organizational talent.

A lot of the big open source foundations (the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc) are essentially producer co-ops for open source software, even if that's not what the paperwork says.

I think we should absolutely build more co-ops, for things that really matter.