Groupmuse Year 8
2020: A year so hectic, so dynamic, so uncertain that I literally never got around to writing a Groupmuse year 7 blog post! Which is a shame, because 2019 was a peach, compared to what was to come.
The year sure started pretty, though! In January 2020, we organized 204 groupmuses — and 76 in NYC alone. In February, we had our biggest revenue month of all time. And then. March.
We’ve told the story of the transition to online elsewhere and in great detail, so I’ll spare you the play by play. But, sensing that this was the moment when our community needed us the most, we brought the whole team full time, ready to throw every red cent we had to make this transition and to show the world what a truly resilient project looks like.
And, indeed, our community didn’t miss a beat — by the last week of March, we had a full slate of virtual groupmuses, and they were making musicians more money than the living room ever did.
The wild reception we got was a powerful validation of the love and care and values-centeredness that has always been the foundation of everything we do. In times of crisis, it’s the deepest values that really shine through. This modern world is fragile one, but fundamental truths don’t change, and Groupmuse has staked its path on those truths, and from that comes a resilience and a flexibility.
So we made this dramatic pivot and opened ourselves to a deeper level of service — suited for the needs of the day — and the big changes just kept coming.
Worker-ownership
After the whole team joined full time, we were able to bring to fruition a long held aspirate: Full cooperative ownership. And in the last quarter of 2020, we made it official. Structurally speaking, there is no hierarchical or equity ownership differential between, for instance, myself, who started Groupmuse in 2012, and Bexx, who joined full time a year ago. We believe cooperativism is the future for our market society — a structure both suited to thrive in a competitive economy AND not a vehicle designed for the radical concentration of wealth and power into ever fewer hands — like so many startups.
But beyond abstract ideals, the step has been a transformational one for our workplace culture and how Groupmuse feels. 8 years ago, when Ezra and Kyle joined as co-founders, there was such a weight lifted as I, for the first time, felt the mission held by a larger collective — the load lightened threefold. To once again surrender power and control for the sake of more hands tending to the garden has been such a revelation and an expression of true resilience. Groupmuse was never about scoring a jackpot, it has always been about bringing new values into the culture in a way that’ll outlive and out grow the founding energy that brought it into being. Now that we’re cooperatively owned, I can confidently say we’ve achieved that. But we’re still just beginning.
Musician-ownership
The movement into cooperativism has given us the surge of momentum to finally start taking definitive steps to our biggest, brightest vision: a vast musician-owned cooperative. If transitioning from a 3-fold founding team into a 6-person worker-owned cooperative was a big relief and a leveling up, the transition to a 50, 200, 6000 person musician-owned cooperative will assuredly be the most consequential development in the life of the project. You can read all about the process here, and it’s underway.
The Groupmuse Foundation
The Pandemic was ultimately most disruptive to our bottom line. We built our revenue model around helping organizations fill the concert hall with our beloved community members, and when the concert halls shuttered, we were in a bind. We’d for so long PRIDED ourselves on NOT being a nonprofit, but rather, a nimble, radically values oriented engine of economic and cultural production, but ultimately, the work was more important than the ideological commitment. And there is a whole wide world of classical music lovers an patrons out there who WANT to support our work transforming classical music culture — but the standard protocol for channeling that support is to make a charitable and tax deductible contribution. And at a time of urgent need, we decided we couldn’t just leave that support on the table. BUT: we wanted to maintain a flexible structure which allows for musicians ownership and worker ownership — so we started an entirely separate but intimately connected organization called The Groupmuse Foundation, that has a mission of supporting and empowering musicians so they thrive in times of pandemic and beyond AND to support efforts to diversify the classical music community. You can read more about our process here and support the Foundation here.
Planetary Music Movement and Historical Music
The call to enshrine a commitment to diversity in the mission of the Foundation was catalyzed by George Floyd’s brutal murder — which brought a couple of other huge changes at Groupmuse as well. The first is the Planetary Music Movement (or PMM) Series — an ongoing effort to center and celebrate Black life in the world of classical music. The second change was fundamental: We decided to evolve our commitment to Western classical music to a more broadly conceived commitment to all historical musics of the world, so as to challenge and grow past the potentially supremacist underpinnings in the world of Art music. Of course there will still be OODLES of classical music to delight in at Groupmuse, but you’ll also see Jazz — and maybe a master of the Arabian Nee as well… You can read all about this watershed moment of the organization here.
Beyond all that, we just had a PACKED year of our standard fare:
# of Groupmuse organized — 997
$ earned for Musicians — $270,000
Average $ earned per player — $264/player/groupmuse
# of musicians onboarded for live-streaming — 365
# of folks who joined for live-streams — ~20k
Quite the 2020 gang!
Thanks for being part of it ❤
In love and service,
Team Groupmuse
