If 2016 to 2019 was a failed attempt at for-profit monetization, and 2020 to 2024 was about building community - now that we've transitioned to a non-profit model - how the hell are we going to survive?

Purpose

As a registered charity, our future depends upon people believing in what we do and giving us their money to support the mission. Thing is, up to this point - we didn't have a mission. We didn't have a purpose. For sure we connected people across cultures, nations, and generations (which is pretty awesome in itself,) but aside from publishing amazing playlists, we didn't have a purpose or any kind of organizing belief.

It was time to establish what that was going to be.

It's In The Title!

It was music that brought us together. It was music that was at the center of the original idea and the reason why people stuck around. But what was it about us - the musicto community - what beliefs about music did we have in common?

We noticed that the people who stayed all shared a deep enthusiasm for music - we all thought music was great. There were songs, albums, and artists we loved that we wanted to share with a wider audience. Our playlists were a great way to introduce listeners to this music - and we believed this was a good thing.

When we distilled this down, we got to a simple truth: we all believed that music can make the world better.

And this was the unlock.

There's a big difference between "We're a global community that makes playlists" and "We're a global community that believes music can make the world better."

So we now have an organizing principle, something we can communicate effectively to grow our community. Great. We also have a culture of collaboration that creates opportunities for connection and relationships to form, with a secondary benefit that it creates unique "content" that can be published and distributed across multiple platforms. Double Great.

But if people are going to give money to our organization, we need a more tangible output - something visible, something that people recognize as making a difference.

What Do We Know To Be True?

It's 2025 and the world is feeling kinda scary. And it's not just the sense of uncertainty and the constant, rapid change - it's the fear that is constantly being stoked. We're being told to dislike, to distrust, to hate "the other" - to hate people who are different from us. The rhetoric tells us that people with opposing views aren't just wrong, they're evil.

At musicto, we know this isn't true.

In our global community - of all cultures, nations, and generations - we've found the more different we are - the more interesting our creative output becomes. It's our differences that make our playlists so compelling and our relationships so unexpected and nourishing.

So how do we bring this truth to the world? How do we enter the narrative and begin to change the conversation around hate and fear?

Well, we have a global community with a global platform - let's gather some data.

What Are You Afraid Of?

In the beginning of March we started asking the question "What Are You Afraid Of, And Why?"

We asked our community, we asked friends and family, we asked artists that were submitting tracks, and visitors to our website. Along with the question we also asked their generation and the continent they live on.

We hypothesize that the data will show we have way more in common than your local demagogue might like ;-p. We think the insights around age and location are going to be novel & interesting enough to catch people's attention.

The plan is to create a compelling publication that can be distributed across multiple platforms and pitched to media outlets. We intend to use this as a calling card to enter the conversation around hate and fear, ultimately sharing how musicto's approach to creative collaboration could be explored in other communities.

We've had over 500 responses in the last two months and we're aiming for a thousand before we do the first real analysis. Please take a few minutes to answer the question - and if possible - share this page with everyone you know. While 1,000 responses would be a great start, 10,000 responses would be amazing.

Coda

This is the first "program" from the musicto community. We anticipate many more.

Now that we've worked out a process, we can replicate this in the future. Because we ask responders if they'd like to be informed when we publish insights, we have a growing mailing list of people we can reach out to. There are many questions we'd like to ask the world.

Sharing insights from our global audience enables us to enter different conversations and help change the narrative, however this is just one strategy. We know there will be new ideas and opportunities that become available to us as we grow and develop.

musicto is a long play, we plan to be around for decades, centuries even. We believe that millions, even billions of people believe as we do - that music can make the world better. If we grow our global community and connect a fraction of them - through music - the impact would be extraordinary.