Artists’ Co‑ops vs Big Platforms

Artists could form cooperative, artist‑owned platforms to capture more of the value chain (distribution, rights management, fan monetization), but practical barriers — coordination costs, up‑front capital, rights complexity, and network effects of incumbents — explain why these experiments rarely scale beyond niche or legacy cases like Apple Corps. The article uses the Beatles’ Apple Corps and the contrast with modern streaming billionaires to show the political‑economic gap between artists’ aims and platform realities. — If artists could realistically deploy cooperative platforms, the economics of culture and the politics of platform regulation (antitrust, payment flows, labor rights) would be reshaped, affecting who captures value from music, film and other creative work.