Central MA Gear Library

CMGL is a not-for-profit resource library for musicians living in (or traveling through) central Massachusetts.

The story of the music community over the last 15 years has been us losing enough ground to rent-seekers such that most musicians can’t really make money without giving up a piece to someone. Whether it be hosting music on streaming services who helped outlaw file sharing, playing at venues which are all increasingly under the umbrella of one or two companies, booking and PR agents whose network you rent, or labels whose capital you rent — the point is this that musicians are kept from having a say in their livelihoods in any meaningful way.

This is as much a problem of inefficiency as it is a lack of a democratic workplace. The infrastructure of the music industry is really only built to handle a handful of record companies pushing their artists through their media companies at a precise metric which makes sure they never over-saturate. It gets its cut from large diversity of artists which make music to host on or perform through the companies in which they have shares. Isn’t that amazing? You get none of the benefits of being signed to Sony, but hosting your streams on Spotify still give you a 50/50 deal with them (or worse)!

There is no changing the music industry. There is only building the music community. Only through building infrastructure which won’t charge a mark-up, where profit is reinvested and resources are shared can we possibly support the abundance of creating and performing artists who transmit culture and build community. We are plugging into the larger movement towards postcapitalism where communities are vessels for socialism and we aren’t stuck waiting on the state to provide us a base standard of living.

The gear library is made up of two parts: the library itself and the larger network. The library acts as a fund which invests in gear that we can see contributing to the local or larger music community. Currently we have one touring vehicle and one full backline of gear. We charge fees for use with the hope of paying back the gear and any overage is reinvested into the fund. The fund is used to pay those who contribute labor hours to the project, but is not liquidated and is kept separate from any individual’s net worth.

As this is a project of efficiency, we never buy more gear than we need and we tap local musicians and institutions to build out the library of gear available to our community. If you have touring vehicles or gear that you would wish to rent out to CMGL, get in touch and we will add you to our list of gear.

CURRENTLY IN SEARCH OF:

-Storage/Jam Space