sone is a music community for music communities.
Sone: A blueprint for openly building viable alternatives
Sone builds, publishes, and releases with community and openness in mind, the results of which are available for others to contribute to, co-own, collaborate within, replicate, experiment with, and build into something else altogether. We're working to re-imagine how both IRL & URL experiences might better serve us.
Sone does not accept vc-funding or private equity. What we build is in service exclusively to whom we build it for. All revenue is generated from grants, donations, income from our own product and service offerings, and community patronage. We&pos;re interested in incentivizing altruistic outcomes. We believe art can be a vehicle for sustained wealth redistribution, challenging existing conventions, creating systems that better serve us, and regaining sovereignty from the silo&pos;d rent-seeking platforms that continually betray our trust.
To that end, Sone is a 501(c)3 nonprofit registered in Portland, OR, USA. Our IRL work is centered around our physical location in SE Portland where we are renovating a former print shop into a music venue, cafe, print studio, community hub, and third space for our neighborhood and beyond. Our URL work is cooperatively owned and operated with open source code and publicly available data. No one can buy or sell what we create, not even us.
The Sone nonprofit mission statement is as follows:
“Sone designs and builds infrastructure for and with the independent music community. Our core service enables artists, listeners, and record labels alike to self-release and self-publish online via an open source, cooperatively owned and operated framework. Our primary goal is to educate about and create systems that pass as much value to artists for their work while creating more equitable outcomes for all participants within the scope of online marketplaces for music.”
We maintain a two-pronged approach in enacting our mission, focusing on the physical and digital simultaneously: Our physical, IRL focus currently centers renovating our space at 3303 SE Milwaukie Ave, with the goal of being open to the public by 2026. Our digital, URL focus currently centers building Tone, a listener-centric music service that is owned and operated by everyone who uses it. These initiatives are ongoing and you can contribute:
Help us build Tone, an equitable music marketplace: say hello over at our Discord or check out our codebase on GitLab.