(READ THE FOLLOW UP HERE TO SEE HOW THE EXPERIMENT WENT)

Since well before receiving the offer to headline Cervantes in Spring of 2023, I had already been going deep down ideological rabbit holes learning about socioeconomics, history (specifically through the lens of class struggle), philosophy, geopolitics, etc, and brainstorming how I could one day utilize my platform to spread these ideas, spark some much needed conversations around the topic of class & socio economics in our industry and society as a whole, and eventually have some sort of positive material impact on the world, so by the time that offer did roll around, it only made sense for this cervantes headline to be a trial run for just that.

Most companies, businesses, and events alike in the US & most of the western world function in a way that can be best described as authoritarian: There’s 1 person or a small group of people at the top, sometimes followed by one or multiple hierarchical layers of management, and then finally, at the bottom, you have the workers. Alternatives to this structure are not obvious, but let me be clear—they exist.

me and you (left), haters (right)

We hear a lot about openers getting pay that ranges from shit to nothing at all, big artists that get paid multiple years worth of avg annual salaries for a 1hr time slot while their support acts get 1/100th or less of that number, and VJs that are criminally underpaid & under appreciated—and that’s just the music industry! While I don’t think that the inequities in the music industry at “my level” are nearly as vast as they are on the more corporate event circuits, I still wanted to use this cervantes headline as an opportunity to demonstrate that there are alternative ways of “running the show” that are both equitable and leave everyone involved feeling better about their participation.

For this event, we democratized the pay for all 9 of the DJs, VJs, and the photographer. That means that each person involved had a say in how much they themselves got paid, as well as everyone else. This excludes staff at cervantes, as well as the production companies providing sound/lighting that are involved, but for future headline events (where I’m allowed to do this) I would love to include any/all labor involved in making an event happen in this process (big thank you & shoutout to cervantes for letting us do this in the first place).

We did it by providing the information of the total budget amount to each VJ, DJ, & Photographer, as well as a list of all 9 participants, including themselves. From the total budget, each participant anonymously allocated that number across themselves and the 8 other people involved however they saw fit. That means each person received 9 total numbers: 8 separate votes from everyone else, 1 for themselves. For each person, we then added the 9 numbers together, and divided it by 9 to get the average. The average number is what each individual got paid.

While we do plan on publicizing the results from our democratic process & the allocation % reached, in the meantime, here’s an example of how ‘DJ 1’ should get paid:

DJ 1 anon vote for self: $1500
DJ 2 anon vote for DJ 1: $1200
DJ 3 anon vote for DJ 1: $1800
DJ 4 anon vote for DJ 1: $800
DJ 5 anon vote for DJ 1: $750
DJ 6 anon vote for DJ 1: $2000
VJ 1 anon vote for DJ 1: $1250
VJ 2 anon vote for DJ 1: $1000
Photographer anon vote for DJ 1: $1250
Total Number: $11,550 / 9 = $1,283.33 avg = DJ 1 pay

Democratized pay does not mean “everyone gets paid the same”. It does mean narrowing the gap between people who get paid the most and people who get paid the least, though.

At the end of the day, this is just an experiment of sorts—a trial run not only to demonstrate that alternative ways of doing things are possible, but to also get people thinking & talking more, whether it’s about how businesses and society are structured, how pay is determined, how & why hierarchies are formed (and whether or not they are justified), or what our economic structure really is (and whether or not any of us have actually consented to it). I certainly don’t expect nor think that democratizing the pay for 1 event will somehow lead to a cascading chain of events that changes all of society, nor do I think that this is particularly revolutionary, but for me, at least, it’s a start.

I desperately want to see and actively take part in changing the world around us for the better, and I am only in the early stages of my journey in figuring out how to do so. I was pretty much a full blown nihilist and an alcoholic until ~3.5 yrs ago when I quit drinking alcohol, and it’s only been since then that I’ve actually started to care not only for myself, but for others & for the world around me as well. Even after quitting alcohol, it took me another couple years just for me to start really questioning the world around me, our economic structure, our country’s role in the global stage of geopolitics, etc, so I definitely am still very early on in my research, studies & learning on these topics, and am learning as I go, and sharing what I can.

There will be more updates on or before April 25th providing more detailed info on how the pay was allocated, merch, & anything else I might’ve forgotten to include already.

Thank you for reading this far. I have no idea how this will be received but I’m very grateful to be a part of such an amazing community. My intention here is not to get on some moral high horse, but to inspire others to think of what other alternatives might actually be possible for themselves, their communities, their friends & family, and for society as a whole. I want to seek out others who are equally as dissatisfied as I am with the status quo, our economic structure, and the imperialist USA. This is just the start of a new chapter for me and the Keota project to do as much as I can with my platform.

In the meantime, stay tuned!

P.S. I wanna give a very important shoutout to neuro.studio, not as a representative, but as an admirer. The cooperative model that neuro.studio uses has been very inspiring me, and I just wanted to give them a shout out neuro.studio has been a huge inspiration for me. I had never even heard the term “cooperative” until I had discovered neuro.studio. From Wikipedia, “A cooperative is an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly owned and democratically-controlled enterprise”. And from neuro.studio’s website, “neuro.studio is an event, arts, & entertainment cooperative company established in 2020. We promote, operate, and manage live entertainment events, festivals, talent, and art. We are comprised of market leaders aiming to democratize art through worker-owned systems.” TL;DR Cooperatives are autonomous and democratic “businesses” that are both worker run owned, while companies are businesses that operate in an authoritarian, hierarchical, top down manner, where 1 person or a small group of people govern everyone below them.