It is challenging, if not impossible, for a cooperative to obtain funding for that push into "really big" that nearly every major tech company has had to raise. There is no exit strategy for a cooperative, no cash out option for investors. Cooperatives historically raise money from their members, or use traditional loans, neither of which is feasible for the kind of independent artists that would benefit from this type of entity.

It would need a benevolent, and very wealthy, collection of artists or sympathetic patrons to fund growth, or it would simply be out-gunned by the rest of the industry that actively works against artist independence.

One of my businesses is a worker-owned cooperative. It has challenges that are completely novel to me (having started two small traditional corporations before that), and they're very difficult to overcome. Herding cats is hard, operating under the cooperative principles is hard(er than doing it all for profit), and raising money is effectively impossible for many types of cooperative, as far as I can tell.

Building a competing music or video service to YouTube and Spotify would require tremendous resources, and without the big cash-out promised by those ventures, I don't know how one would make it work.

Easier than you'd think maybe? There are some VERY wealthy artists that might take a personal interest in an effort like this. A few big players could start the coop and bank roll it.

There are very, very few living billionaire musicians (I can think of only three, maybe four), and most of those few have a vested interest in seeing the industry remain the way it is (because they've built their fortune within it and have become moguls within that industry in their own right; for example Jay Z and Kanye West and Madonna who all have rosters of artists effectively in their employ, using the traditional indentured servant music industry model). And, the definition of "VERY wealthy" looks different in the tech industry than it does in the music industry.

I'd love to be wrong. But, I've been an indie and DIY and punk music fan almost my entire life, and I've worked in the music industry. It's better than it's ever been for independent artists in many regards, but Google and Apple aren't on the side of artists all that much more than the historic record industry was/is, and it's very hard to have them as an adversary. Would you want to try to compete directly with Google or Apple? And, if you were someone with tens of millions of disposable income would you want to risk it on a venture that is likely to fail and if it succeeds won't do much more than pay back your investment capital and a small bit of interest?

You are very on-point - what does a successful artist do as soon as they have enough clout in the industry? Start their own label. Sign artists. Take a cut. Negotiate deals with advertising, take a cut of that. Tell the artists on the roster that they're better off with you than without you.

The parallels are stunning in this case. Thank you for mentioning your perspective, as I think it bears repeating that the "music industry" has always been like this - the names and methods may look different, but the model is the same. Ain't nobody signed to iTunes or YouTube, near as I can tell...

These exist. Here in Germany, the major (actually, only) rights-management agency is the GEMA, which is wholly controlled by "the artists".

It's a nightmare, though. It is ruled by the bureaucrats running it, in conjunction with the artists that actually profit from it, i. e. old people with a large back catalogue. It's constantly fighting with the businesses using music, i. e. youtube still blocks 90% of videos with music because they haven't agreed on prices. Clubs might have to close because they've tripled prices recently. Small bands sometimes sign up, only to find out they actually have to pay to play their own songs, and through the magic of the most convoluted payout formula ever, might not actually get as much back as they pay in. Even if they get something out of it, it may take 18 months.

I've had thoughts in this area before. Such a co-op could build a platform on which they can share media, crowdfund, sell whatever, and whatever else the artists want to do to get themselves out there.

Even if they didn't build and run the platform themselves directly (due to the fact that a bunch of artists have better things to do) - if they contracted out the development and maintenance to a third-party company - they'd have ownership over the platform, be able to switch maintenance company, and therefore take their fanbases with them if things start going wrong.

What about a Bandcamp+Vimeo partnership?

United Artists sort of started that way I think.

That would in fact be awesome.