Becoming a Member of The Pack Music Co-operative.
Your Rights and Responsibilities
Becoming a member of The Pack Music Co-operative is a commitment to actively supporting the development of a fair and equitable streaming service for local, original, unsigned musicians, to ensure that they can continue investing their time, energy, talent and skill into creating the incredible music that we love.
But being a member of our platform co-op is no ordinary subscription. If you sign-up as an active member, it means you become a voting member of the Pack's community, with all of the rights and responsibilities that come with that. It means you can influence the way The Pack develops, and co-create the functions that our nascent streaming service provides to our musicians, businesses, music lovers, local governments and government agencies. It means you become part of a music community, and, it means you own a little piece of The Pack, for as long as you are a member.
To start with, becoming a member of the The Pack Music Co-operative is a pledge, which demonstrates your commitment to supporting original, independent music, either as a content creator, or as a patron. Your support will help the co-operative to build the streaming platform and support and advocate for a fair streaming ecosystem, which benefits all of its participants.
Membership Types
There are a variety of membership types for musicians, businesses, individual listeners and government or corporate members, and these come with slightly different expectations. The Co-operative Rules, which are registered with the Government of Western Australia, set out the terms and conditions that all members must abide by. Please ensure that you have noted these before you sign up as a co-operative member.
There are several different classes of membership:
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Individual membership (Creator Musician) - a free membership held by any solo musician or artist who can and will actively contribute musical content to The Pack Australia.
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Joint membership (Creator Ensemble) - a free membership held jointly by up to 4 persons, creating music as a band or ensemble, who can and will actively contribute musical content to The Pack Australia.
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Individual Membership (Patron Musician) - a paid membership held held by any solo musician or artist who can and will actively contribute musical content to The Pack Australia.
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Joint Membership (Patron Ensemble) - a paid membership held jointly by up to 4 persons, creating music as a band or ensemble, who can and will actively contribute musical content to The Pack Australia.
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Associate Membership (Personal Patron) - a paid membership held by individual music lovers who wish to access and support local, original, independent music when The Pack Music Co-operative launches.
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Associate Membership (Business Patron) - a paid membership held by business patrons who wish to access and support local, original, independent music when The Pack Music Co-operative launches.
*NB: there are other classes of membership available, in particular for musicians who wish to become members but are under 14 years of age and therefore require a legal guardian to accept membership, and memberships for government / corporate patrons, which are issued on either a per capita (local government), or size of entity (corporate or government agency) basis. To access these membership types, please enquire through our contact page.
If you'd like to sign-up to The Pack Music Co-operative - just click the link below to jump to our sign-up page!
Beyond these memberships, there will be other ways to support the work of The Pack Music Co-operative as we work towards the development of a Not-for-Profit, Cultural Organisation, which will underpin the advocacy and philanthropy work that our Board and supporters wish to enable in our community.
What your membership is not
At this stage, membership to The Pack Music Co-operative is not a streaming service membership - it is a co-operative membership. You are becoming an active part of a creative community and your contribution will grow and sustain that community.
As the streaming platform is still in development, you will not receive a membership to this, nor will you be committing to the licensing terms and conditions that accompany memberships to a streaming service. If you have pledged to become a content member, those terms and conditions will be issued with your access to the streaming service, when you upload your recorded content (in the same way they are for major streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music).
However, if you become a co-operative member now, will receive your streaming membership as soon as the system is launched, as your membership fees for the co-op will cover the cost of your streaming service.
Your co-op membership will help us to co-create the perfect system with our music and listener community, so that when we do launch, your streaming service will be perfectly tailored to the community's needs.