  Over the last decade there has been a continuing decline in social trust on
the part of individuals with regards to the handling and fair use of personal
data, digital assets and other related rights in general. At the same time,
there has been a change in the employment patterns for many people through the
emergence of the gig economy. These gig workers include artists, songwriters
and musicians in the music industry. We discuss the notion of the data
cooperative with fiduciary responsibilities to its members, which is similar in
purpose to credit unions in the financial sector. A data cooperative for
artists and musicians allows the community to share IT resources, such as data
storage, analytics processing, blockchains and distributed ledgers. A
cooperative can also employ smart contracts to remedy the various challenges
currently faced by the music industry with regards to the license tracking
management.
