It started with a question nobody had answered.

The question

Streaming is how the world hears music now. So why is it nearly impossible for the people who make that music to earn a living from it?

Campfire began with that question, and with a harder observation underneath it: the problem is not that there is no money in recorded music. It is how that money gets divided, and who never sees it. Our founding documents call this what it is: labor insecurity among music workers. Everything the foundation has done since 2022 has been an attempt to build one working answer.

2022: A class project refuses to stay one

Campfire took shape in a Music Industry Seminar at Georgetown University, taught by a musicologist and a music policy advocate: Anna Celenza, a Georgetown and Johns Hopkins author-professor, and Michael Bracy of Music Policy Forum. That class is where Campfire was first born as a final project. The idea that came out of that classroom in 2021 was simple to say and hard to build. A streaming platform run as a public charity, where each listener's money goes to the artists that listener actually plays.

Davis Provost, Jackson St. George, and Johannes Larson, all three born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, were the ones who formed the idea into a music platform called Campfire. Fellow founder Will Smyth, also raised in Duluth, gave Campfire its foundational graphic design and brand. The students took it seriously enough to incorporate. Campfire Music Foundation became a Minnesota nonprofit corporation on July 28, 2022, with IRS 501(c)(3) recognition following that August. Johannes Larson, supported strategically by Georgetown business and foreign service student Andrew Dunn, led the formation of the founding board, drawing in students from Amherst, Grinnell, Northeastern, and Boston University, student musicians and student music fans alike. That fall, Campfire was the only nonprofit among 33 student ventures at Georgetown's Rocket Pitch competition, and won the People's Choice Award.

"My inspiration is to build a long-term solution to the issues facing today's music industry, a solution that works for all stakeholders, and not just a few."
Johannes Larson, founder, in The Hoya, October 2022

The first year looked like what a volunteer nonprofit's first year actually looks like. The first donors were friends, classmates, and family. A community concert paid working musicians directly. Johannes Larson's senior capstone in American Music Culture, advised by ethnomusicologist Benjamin Harbert, chair of Georgetown's Department of Performing Arts, turned months of research on the history and business of streaming into a written thesis and a public case: a concert and talk where the argument was tested in a room alongside the paper. And in November 2023, Campfire co-produced its first national convening, the Music Ecosystem Forum, with the Music Policy Forum and Georgetown University.

2022 to 2025: The volunteer years

For its first three years, Campfire had no paid staff. What it had was time: more than 10,000 volunteer hours put into the model, the partnerships, and the platform itself.

The team did the unglamorous work first. Before writing serious code, they held nearly 400 structured research conversations with artists, fans, industry professionals, and technologists, testing whether a user-centric royalty model would actually change what working musicians earn, and what artists would need from a platform that claimed to serve them.

The convening work grew alongside the research. Campfire partnered on the Cascadia Music Summit, and co-hosted the national Music Policy Forum in 2023 and again in 2025 in Seattle, where Campfire presented its answer to a blunt prompt: what if we started over and rebuilt music streaming from the ground up?

Campfire sponsors and co-produces the JAM Duluth concert series each year, putting working jazz musicians on stage in the Twin Ports and Iron Range communities of Minnesota.

2025: The public steps in

In the fall of 2025, Campfire ran its first public fundraising campaign: a crowdfunding drive and a benefit concert at the Icehouse in Minneapolis, where the artists on the bill were paid the same night the case was made. Donors across the country joined, and that same season Jessica Schantz Taneja and Hemant Taneja made a founding contribution to move the platform from prototype toward beta.

Notable individual contributions came from Greg McNeely of the Manitou Fund and the McNeely Music Center in White Bear Lake, and from Davis Fansler of Santa Barbara Records.

Fundraising to date has passed $150,000. The organization was run entirely by volunteers until paid contractor work began midway through the 2025-2026 fiscal year.

2026: Built, and running in private pilot

The platform is real now. The listener app, the artist dashboard, and the operations backend are built and running in a private, invite-only pilot with Minnesota artists and listeners first, and more than 1,500 artists and fans signed up for access.

What remains is the part volunteers alone cannot do. Campfire is preparing renewed fundraising to take it from a volunteer-led organization to a staffed one, open the platform to more artists and listeners, and prove the model at scale: that streaming can pay artists fairly, sustain local music infrastructure, and still be something a listener can afford.

The name

Campfires are where the founders grew up sharing music: a place to gather, with nothing for sale. That is the standard the platform is held to: music shared between people, and the musicians who make it paid fairly for their work.