As a mission-driven social enterprise and platform co-operative, The Pack prioritises authentic connections between Musicians, Listeners and Businesses for the purpose of creating a healthy music ecology. It’s built on a cooperative that prioritises fairness for content creators, not profit for CEOs, investors, labels and shareholders.

The Pack further promotes connections between Business and Listeners by notifying local music lovers of when they are in or near a Pack streaming business, allowing Listeners to interact with the business’ playlists, and to access localised rewards. This innovation anticipates increased customer retention and spend at Pack streaming businesses, generating supportive business patronage, and allows for valuable localised cultural and economic data sharing with local and State government.

To start with, until The Pack amasses a significant volume of local content, there’s not a huge value in creating highly localised virtual perimeters – so we’ll focus on getting WA made music to our WA businesses and listeners. We’ll only be geofencing for preference / priority. Effectively this will mean that artists who are local (to a venue) will be played first.

The real value of geolocation is that we will create much more localised visibility for our WA artists. Listeners will be notified when they are near Pack businesses / venues / artists / gigs local to them and will know that they can interact with these opportunities, as part of their music community. They will also be able to also choose to receive notifications for new music, gigs, merch releases, events and exclusive happenings from local artists that they have interacted with.

The Pack is based on a hybrid model which will work like this: Company (Pty Ltd) + (Platform) Co-operative + Not-For-Profit Cultural Organisation. 1. The Company owns and protects the music streaming technology and Intellectual Property. 2. The Co-operative manages and supports the cooperative membership and subscriptions. It licenses the music streaming technology, from the Company. 3. The NFP (in development) will be philanthropic – a grant-making entity to support the preservation of the unique sound of our local music community, and the recording of female identifying, BIPoC, CaLD and LGBTQI+ music and musicians.

Co-ops are owned by their members – not by billionaire CEOs, shareholders and investors – so decisions made on how to distribute the prosperity of the co-op are made by its Board and its members – musicians. This also applies to decisions about how the co-op evolves, and the way it is managed. Using a co-op model means that our members (musicians) own the distribution of their creative work, and are actively involved in the success of, and the evolution of the streaming service itself. They are also actively engaged in building the community – as the healthier it is, the more viable the platform is for them.

Co-ops don’t have owners – they have members. The Pack has a 10 Member Board of Directors. Business decisions are made by the Board, but all of our musicians, listeners and businesses are members of some type. The Co-op Rules set these parameters. Our full members (musicians) have voting rights and can influence the development of the Pack and make recommendations to the Board and broader membership. The ratified Cooperative Rules can be found on our Memberships page.