If you retain your ISRCs and UPCs when moving from one distributor to another, links and stream counts will remain as is.
Surely that's an issue solved by the market, if there is a distributor that is reliable & fairly priced then people will move to use and stay with them. I think the current issue is that a lot of the big name distributors are marketers first, distributors second.
Since when are non-profits not part of the market?
No commercial distributor can hold out forever against the temptation expanding into marketing. That's as hopeless as wishing that ISPs would stay as dumb pipes.
There should be more competition: a non-profit which offers fewer features but which you aren't constantly wondering when it will flip and screw you over, versus more featureful and slicker commercial competition.
They're not, but I don't see how it being non-profit would make a difference to the problems you're suggesting. You can be for-profit and still have a sustainable, fair and innovative model.
By marketing I mean marketing themselves as a service, not marketing the music they handle.
Until ownership or management changes. Or has a change of heart. Or gets squeezed by an aggressive competitor.
Long term relationships with companies are fraught. Establishing vendor lockin followed by exploitation is a proven-successful business stratagem.
Once it becomes expensive for customers to leave a service, it is perpetually tempting to dial up the cost of the service until just below the point where customers bolt. The more painful you can make it to leave, the more you can wring from them.
Even if the company you're doing business with isn't exploiting you today, you'd be well advised to check back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that...
Or better, to avoid forming such long term relationships with entities that are perpetually at risk of going bad.
I worked in the music industry for 6 years. There are so many people in that space who want to do the right thing, who attempt to do something "sustainable, fair and innovative" — yet the marketplace sadly and stubbornly resists their efforts, corrupting them or crushing them. Where are all the benevolent record labels that ought to exist, by your logic?
By having this entity be a member-governed cooperative, you take on a different set of problems. (I've served on the board of a large 501(c)(3) so I'm well acquainted with the frustrations.) But at least you avoid the terrible misalignment of incentives that comes from relying on a profit-driven middleman over the long term.