I think Co-ops are the way to go, because if your employees and your customers are also your owners (shareholders) then doing what's right for the customer is by definition what's best for shareholders.
Co-ops are a very flexible and successful business structure. For example, people in the northeastern US probably know of Cabot Cheddar. This is part of the Agri-Mark co-op, which does something like $1 billion in annual business and employs about 1,000 people.
Agri-Mark is a "producer co-op," which means that it's owned by dairy farms. There are also very successful "consumer co-ops," as well as "worker co-ops."
There are many nice things about co-ops:
- They can be economically competitive.
- They're democratically run. (Larger ones often elect a board and/or appoint management.)
- They're strictly voluntary associations.
There are also reasons why you don't see more co-operatives:
- They don't have huge incentives to scale. There are plenty of amazing grocery co-ops, for example, that have one or two excellent stores but no desire to expand.
- They raise capital through their members. Details vary, but they tend to scale more like bootstrapped businesses than startups.
But a musicians' producer co-op could absolutely build something like Bandcamp. It would be a lot of work, and it would require some genuine organizational talent.
A lot of the big open source foundations (the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc) are essentially producer co-ops for open source software, even if that's not what the paperwork says.
I think we should absolutely build more co-ops, for things that really matter.
