It's a great start. Co-ops and non-profits can also be subverted and taken over. I hope you look ahead and plan very carefully.<p>For example, according to an (unverified) story someone told me, a vendor to US east coast food cooperatives now controls many of them; they get their person in, pass bylaws empowering them and disempowering the board (the board usually lacking sophistication), and have deeper pockets for any legal struggle than any co-op member does.<p>Also, I remember in the news that a non-profit or limited-profit company in the IT industry, founded for the public good, is going to be turned into a for-profit. The board actually fired the person behind this plan, but that person came back and fired the board members.
I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery<p>I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre.<p>Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the music people create sucks. This may not seem true if you mainly listen to "radio" and playlists, but if you ever get access to a large catalog of independent music, try picking stuff at pseudo-random and take notes. As much as I love good art (and I do), most art is not good art. You can't go on popularity because some of the great artists (especially on Bandcamp) are relatively unknown and therefore are not popular. For example, Thousand Needles in Red is a phenomenal band with great albums, and almost completely unknown. These Four Walls is similar (but at least they are on Youtube Music/Spotify/etc). I'd buy the crap out of similar albums, but discovering them is very challenging. I mainly found those two out of random luck.<p>Anyway I'm rambling, but I do hope you can figure out a good means for discovery. I think finding and grouping people with similar tastes is among the best ways, and also having artists that a person likes recommend other artists can be super valuable.
Edit: it's been pointed out to me that the zine actually is publicly available for free - <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ra6r2zSkw7NCYNTAqP9923ValZiYmXfE/view" rel="nofollow">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ra6r2zSkw7NCYNTAqP9923ValZi...</a><p>I really like the overall idea. Two thoughts I had while browsing.<p>From the main page:<p>> PURCHASE ZINE<p>Is the only way to get a copy of the manifesto, really to purchase it (or join as a member)? How is someone supposed to even know whether they want to be involved in the project, if they aren't allowed to read the document first?<p>and from the Docs:<p>> How is Subvert funded?<p>Unless I missed it, nothing in docs mentions the most obvious source of funding for a marketplace - a cut of revenue? Is there any plan for that?<p>If I were a member of such a collective, I'd rather give the collective a small cut of my revenue than have to deal with the complexity and risks (and potential loss of control) of dealing with outside investors.
What exactly is meant by co-ownership in your case? What exact "Ability to influence platform policies and features" would I have and how are product/business decisions made? What is the organisation structure?<p>The phrase "Collective ownership" sounds romantic but it can mean many things, from very good to outright scam, depending on implementation.
I'm glad to see new concepts emerge like this that challenge the governance and benefit of platforms by shareholder corporations for their own self-interested purposes.<p>I joined as a "Founding Supporter" of the Subvert co-op last night when I saw a post on my Twitter (X) feed.<p>I really hope to see more tech cooperatives in the future. The dominant paradigm of neo-fiefdom tech platforms is both tired and uninspiring.
So, great, another place to host and sell your music. Love bandcamp. Nothing really that special about it. It rose to popularity because it didn't take that much of a cut of sales from the artists and was offering the easy ability to host all the digital files etc. What's different about this? The 'artists' will have a say on the cut that Subvert is taking? Shrug. All sounds fine and not really that complicated. It will all come down to traction and getting a lot of artists/labels to move there, and that is a crapshoot really. Especially since Bandcamp currently hasn't been impacted in any major way. That and the usual not-really-that-minor challenges of hosting/bandwidth/payment processing fees at scale.
Really exciting to see this manifesto.<p>There's already some existing co-operative music store/bandcamp alternative projects that are selling music and accepting new artists.<p><a href="https://jam.coop" rel="nofollow">https://jam.coop</a> is the one we are building. We launched last year in response to the sale of bandcamp and the uncertainty we felt in our communities of musicians who depend on Bandcamp for some or part of their living. In contrast to subvert we've decided to take an incremental approach. We're incubating jam inside an existing worker co-operative, building the features that our users need, and working towards an "exit to community" where jam will become a multi-stakeholder co-op owned by artists and workers.<p>I'm also familiar with mirlo and ampwall who are working on similar projects.
The most recent blog post they have up is titled "The Mondragon of Music" which, frankly, is all I needed to see.<p><a href="https://subvert.fm/blog/our-50-year-roadmap-the-mondragon-of-music/" rel="nofollow">https://subvert.fm/blog/our-50-year-roadmap-the-mondragon-of...</a><p>The article mentions the highlights, but a deeper drive into the Mondragon Corp can be found here: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation</a>
Ampwall is also a thing, a public benefit company - <a href="https://ampwall.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ampwall.com/</a>
Listeners want the convenience of Spotify and don’t care about artists or even know what Bandcamp is, let alone something after Bandcamp. I’m an indie artist and I want things to be different but until you convince people to give up convenience for principles, projects like this won’t mean much.
The burning question I have is:<p>Why do artists feel the need for a platform?<p>The tools are out there to allow you to advertise, sell and distribute your music (I'm not talking about the distribution platforms like distrokid etc, fuck streaming, fuck social media and fuck making content whilst we're at it), why give away control over your art?<p>My model is this:<p>* Make some awesome music<p>* Self host it. Provide means for people to download your music (there are so many methods).<p>* Allow donations via reputable method<p>* Crowd fund for big events like creating physical releases, paying for studio time if you need to.<p>* Play as many gigs as you can/want to do<p>* Again fuck social media<p>You have to be dogged and self determined to work hard in order to for your art to be good, once you put the work in and get yourself out there people will want to hear more after seeing your shows.
I make music and would be the main contact for several artists, but I'm not a label per se. Would I join separately for each, or will there be a way for each artist to be added under my account or on separate accounts? Thanks!
A successor to bandcamp would be really nice. I think it is hard to determine if a site will become one, because it is largely about network effect—Bandcamp had enough users (customers and artists) that it was, like, worthwhile to give them your credit card info…<p>Totally tangential and probably revealing that I have absolutely no understanding of the music creation ecosystem and process, but is there room for, like, an online collaboration system? Like a Unity asset store for samples or something? Allow people to remix and then handle the pay out automatically when songs get bought?
How is Bandcamp doing nowadays? I know the backstory of it being bought by Epic, then Epic realizing they have no use for a music store and selling it off to Songtradr who immediately gutted it by firing half of the staff, but I don't use it enough to know if enshittification has set in yet.