Forte Creative Group is built to empower artists and support their creative careers
Our philosophy
The fundamental philosophy of Forte is that when one artist succeeds in reaching people with their creative work, the community of artists, as a whole, benefits from that success. The democratic structure of the organization is built on that principle.
Artist ownership
Forte’s model and cooperative bylaws ensure meaningful control over operations and financial decision-making. As a producer-member, you have concrete rights and meaningful representation in the company, including the right to participate in governance as a director or committee advisor. If you’d rather just play music, that’s fine too! Check out our Membership Agreement and democratic governance structure to see how both sides are accountable to each other.
Creating a community
You won’t have to choose between developing new audiences and getting direct financial support from your existing one – our platform lets you do both! You maintain a subscription-based individual artist page for your fans, and we share your creative work with our community subscribers who want to support the whole regional scene. All of the revenue from community support is reinvested in you and your fellow artists.
Re-imagining subscription-based support
We created a new model that allows you to sustainably grow a reliable stream of income.
- Hard Cap on platform fees
- We set a dollar amount as a cap on the platform fee that Forte takes to maintain operations. For example, if the fee is 10% and the cap is $1.00, if a subscriber chooses to give you any amount more than $10 per month, we can only take $1.00, even if that amount is $500 or $1,000.
- Collective Fundraising
- Rather than encouraging a tier-based system where you constantly add deliverables and are forced to cater to your highest-paying subscribers, we’ve introduced a structure where you can set goals to be met by your audience as a whole. For example, once you reach 10 subscribers at $10 per month, you add a new piece of monthly content, like a private live stream or a song tutorial. Your audience will participate together and share in the benefits.
- Artists control fees
- Each year, the board presents a proposal to the full membership outlining the goals for the next year and suggesting a platform fee that will allow the company to reach those goals, all of which must be aligned with the main mission of the cooperative. The membership must vote to approve that fee.