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.
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.
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.
Smart contracts only affects on-chain stuff, and this deals with real-world things. No smart contract is going to help you if webmasters update website, or if a board decides to add a rule.
Certainly, but when the average org becomes corrupted, you just stop buying its project and let it die. This thing endeavors not to sell you a product, but to sell your product. If it's going to get buy-in from artists, I think it's going to need to make significant promises about not making them regret it. I'd love to see it succeed, but building enough social capital to back long term promises like that is a difficult thing.
I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery
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.
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.
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.
Discoverability of anything outside of the main stream is always difficult.
I listen to a sub-sub-genre of an already niche sub-genre (raw black metal) where it takes A LOT of work to pick out the small amount of good from the large amount of bad. Many of these bands are NOT on any major platforms except for bandcamp.
There are a few review blogs that highlight some of the top stuff (although, most of the reviews are at the black metal level, not the sub-sub-genre), but I find my main source of discovery is bandcamp.
What I do is: 1) Follow LABELS on bandcamp that specialize solely in the music from bands I like, 2) follow other users that have a similar purchase history, 3) and of course follow your favorite bands for updates.
My biggest issue with bandcamp is that I find their notification system and wishlist to be quite lacking.
For notifications and discoverability, I take all the notification emails I get, filter them based on type (new release, new items [gear,stickers,vinyl], and general message updates) and move them into my RSS system (FreshRSS)[0]. I get new music updates every day of things I probably want to at least check out.
For wishlist management, I wrote a simple desktop app[1] that lets me rate, tag, comment, and listen to my albums from my bandcamp wishlist quickly. Anything I _might_ be interested in, I put in my wishlist, then use my app to keep track of if I like it or not. Stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist, but gets a low rating and filters to the bottom while stuff I want to purchase filters up to the top.
Don't get me wrong, you are still going to need to spend time exploring, as you aren't getting your weekly curated playlists.
Wow. Simple user interface, fas and it gives interesting results! It did not find two of my favorite groups, gusgus and subgud, but I added a suggestion. Bookmarking this for later use!
I wonder if they'd be better off creating a collectively-owned record label. Small independent labels do still exist, and I can imagine them leveraging the discovery mechanisms built into streaming platforms, etc., and also having a store front for merchandise / physical media (which would be great for co-promoting the bands in the co-op).
They discuss this in their blog post about how additional industries could be part of this co-op: like labels, studios, housing co-ops, vinyl pressing plants, venues, professional services, and credit unions.
a) Find good DJs playing music you like (YouTube is very helpful here, as is partying)
b) Listen to their sets
c) Shazam (or just trainspot) the tracks you like. (Shazam has a really nice integration with SPotify that dumps everything it IDs into a Spotify playlist)
I am a DJ and constantly on the hunt for new music, this is how I find most of it. No algorithms necessary!
Sorry for what's probably a stupid question, but how do you find DJs on Youtube? Do you literally just search for stuff like "Hard Rock DJ" and then start clicking through results?
That's interesting that you say discovery is hard on Bandcamp. I've actually found their blog content great at finding new artists. Their editorial staff seems to be really tuned in and articles like this make me very happy:
I really like the overall idea. Two thoughts I had while browsing.
From the main page:
> PURCHASE ZINE
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?
and from the Docs:
> How is Subvert funded?
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?
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.
> 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?
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?
The phrase "Collective ownership" sounds romantic but it can mean many things, from very good to outright scam, depending on implementation.
It's structured as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, from what I understand.
"Building an artist-owned platform is a complex challenge, but it’s one we are uniquely positioned to solve. Our growing coalition includes founders of Ampled, a project that helped pioneer the concept of cooperative platforms, as well as artists, music industry professionals, and specialists in cooperative law and platform economics. "
I could see the economics working similar to OpenCollective, but different governance. I know OC announced a restructuring recently, but I don't think it's a co-op model.
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.
I joined as a "Founding Supporter" of the Subvert co-op last night when I saw a post on my Twitter (X) feed.
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.
Mondragon is a great model demonstrating the greater possibilities within complementary-industry cooperative economy. Mondragon is partnership between and across industries.
I could see the regional distribution of industry across/within geography, as applied within Mondragon, mapping well to genre distribution across/within industry production tooling/technologies for Subvert.
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…
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?
It's geared more towards collaboration and there is some system to share any income that gets derived (not sure how it worked). You find someone's song page, download the existing tracks (stems) and work on your own, uploading to the collection when you are finished. I collaborated with some artists and it was fun and I met some folks. They set up payments but I never expected anything to come from that. I thought finding projects that are interesting to collaborate on was difficult. It's just a big pile of music of varying quality and genres.
But the licensing doesn't do pay outs, with sampling you pay once and its yours to use as you see fit. As it should be, we don't need anyone else sticking their hands out.
In general, imo, if somebody contributes usefully to a project they should get paid in line with their contribution.
The flat rate makes sense from an era when tracking that sort of stuff was difficult, but I dunno, it seems like it ought to be possible to track this sort of stuff automatically nowadays.
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.
I’ve got both artist and fan accounts. I’ve not noticed any significant change in service or tools in this whole period of change. The one thing that’s new is “listening parties”, but that seems fairly “on-beand” to me. BC was profitable for years prior to the first sale. Why mess with something that works?
I haven't notice any degradation so far. Recently they even announced a Bandcamp Friday - a day when a Bandcamp commission is 0 and all income from sales goes to the artists. Doesn't look like they try to squeeze as much profits as possible and slowly kill the platform in doing so.
I think that's been going on since early 2020. And yeah, I can't really tell a difference between Bandcamp before it was sold and today. It's a shame that they not only sold to Epic of all companies but then fired so many people.
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.
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.
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.
The FAQ has:
> Is this a crypto thing?
>> No.
I realize that crypto is a bad word for some people, but I think that the above answer has a corollary:
> Does it have a single point of control that will attract corruption if enough of us start using it?
>> Yes
Certainly plenty of poorly designed crypto things also have that point of control, but a well designed crypto thing at least has a shot at resilience.
Smart contracts only affects on-chain stuff, and this deals with real-world things. No smart contract is going to help you if webmasters update website, or if a board decides to add a rule.
See also: NFT delisting.
I think the failure rate for crypto organizations is much higher than the average org.
Certainly, but when the average org becomes corrupted, you just stop buying its project and let it die. This thing endeavors not to sell you a product, but to sell your product. If it's going to get buy-in from artists, I think it's going to need to make significant promises about not making them regret it. I'd love to see it succeed, but building enough social capital to back long term promises like that is a difficult thing.
centralization is easy
I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery
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.
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.
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.
Discoverability of anything outside of the main stream is always difficult.
I listen to a sub-sub-genre of an already niche sub-genre (raw black metal) where it takes A LOT of work to pick out the small amount of good from the large amount of bad. Many of these bands are NOT on any major platforms except for bandcamp.
There are a few review blogs that highlight some of the top stuff (although, most of the reviews are at the black metal level, not the sub-sub-genre), but I find my main source of discovery is bandcamp.
What I do is: 1) Follow LABELS on bandcamp that specialize solely in the music from bands I like, 2) follow other users that have a similar purchase history, 3) and of course follow your favorite bands for updates.
My biggest issue with bandcamp is that I find their notification system and wishlist to be quite lacking.
For notifications and discoverability, I take all the notification emails I get, filter them based on type (new release, new items [gear,stickers,vinyl], and general message updates) and move them into my RSS system (FreshRSS)[0]. I get new music updates every day of things I probably want to at least check out.
For wishlist management, I wrote a simple desktop app[1] that lets me rate, tag, comment, and listen to my albums from my bandcamp wishlist quickly. Anything I _might_ be interested in, I put in my wishlist, then use my app to keep track of if I like it or not. Stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist, but gets a low rating and filters to the bottom while stuff I want to purchase filters up to the top.
Don't get me wrong, you are still going to need to spend time exploring, as you aren't getting your weekly curated playlists.
I run a self-learning music discovery engine called Gnoosic:
https://www.gnoosic.com
I can confirm that when you suggest a random band to a random user, they will dislike it with over 90% probability.
I'd be interested to hear how well Gnoosic works for your musical taste.
Wow. Simple user interface, fas and it gives interesting results! It did not find two of my favorite groups, gusgus and subgud, but I added a suggestion. Bookmarking this for later use!
Neat, thank you! I'll definitely give it a shot and see how it goes.
I wonder if they'd be better off creating a collectively-owned record label. Small independent labels do still exist, and I can imagine them leveraging the discovery mechanisms built into streaming platforms, etc., and also having a store front for merchandise / physical media (which would be great for co-promoting the bands in the co-op).
They discuss this in their blog post about how additional industries could be part of this co-op: like labels, studios, housing co-ops, vinyl pressing plants, venues, professional services, and credit unions.
https://subvert.fm/blog/our-50-year-roadmap-the-mondragon-of...
I assume there will be some energy within the cooperative to establish some shared means of production. It seems probable.
That's very simple...
a) Find good DJs playing music you like (YouTube is very helpful here, as is partying)
b) Listen to their sets
c) Shazam (or just trainspot) the tracks you like. (Shazam has a really nice integration with SPotify that dumps everything it IDs into a Spotify playlist)
I am a DJ and constantly on the hunt for new music, this is how I find most of it. No algorithms necessary!
That only works for a subset of music. It works well for electronica. It works less well for singer songwriters.
Sorry for what's probably a stupid question, but how do you find DJs on Youtube? Do you literally just search for stuff like "Hard Rock DJ" and then start clicking through results?
That's interesting that you say discovery is hard on Bandcamp. I've actually found their blog content great at finding new artists. Their editorial staff seems to be really tuned in and articles like this make me very happy:
https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/aphex-twin-selected-ambient...
Both those bands go hard and I'd never heard of either. In the spirit of your last paragraph, if you have any other favorites, I'd love to hear them!
I really like the overall idea. Two thoughts I had while browsing.
From the main page:
> PURCHASE ZINE
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?
and from the Docs:
> How is Subvert funded?
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?
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.
> > PURCHASE ZINE
> 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?
The ZINE is publicly available: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ra6r2zSkw7NCYNTAqP9923ValZi...
FAQ: "Can I read the zine first?" has an email input box.
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?
The phrase "Collective ownership" sounds romantic but it can mean many things, from very good to outright scam, depending on implementation.
It's structured as a multi-stakeholder cooperative, from what I understand.
"Building an artist-owned platform is a complex challenge, but it’s one we are uniquely positioned to solve. Our growing coalition includes founders of Ampled, a project that helped pioneer the concept of cooperative platforms, as well as artists, music industry professionals, and specialists in cooperative law and platform economics. "
From a introductory blog post.
https://subvert.fm/blog/a-collectively-owned-bandcamp-succes...
More on the co-op model in the FAQ.
https://subvert.fm/docs/what-does-it-mean-to-join-the-co-op/
would this be like open-collective for musicians?
I could see the economics working similar to OpenCollective, but different governance. I know OC announced a restructuring recently, but I don't think it's a co-op model.
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.
I joined as a "Founding Supporter" of the Subvert co-op last night when I saw a post on my Twitter (X) feed.
I really hope to see more tech cooperatives in the future. The dominant paradigm of neo-fiefdom tech platforms is both tired and uninspiring.
Recent and related:
A Collectively Owned Bandcamp Successor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41309217 - Aug 2024 (2 comments)
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.
You might underestimate the power games that are artist royalties agreements and the current domination by large corporates.
This is so awesome. Not because it will necessarily work or be incorruptible, but because it can be replicated.
They're being very open about the legal structuring too, with open source legal docs and agreements.
https://subvert.fm/changelog/
The most recent blog post they have up is titled "The Mondragon of Music" which, frankly, is all I needed to see.
https://subvert.fm/blog/our-50-year-roadmap-the-mondragon-of...
The article mentions the highlights, but a deeper drive into the Mondragon Corp can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Mondragon is a great model demonstrating the greater possibilities within complementary-industry cooperative economy. Mondragon is partnership between and across industries.
I could see the regional distribution of industry across/within geography, as applied within Mondragon, mapping well to genre distribution across/within industry production tooling/technologies for Subvert.
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…
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?
There is this: https://www.kompoz.com/
It's geared more towards collaboration and there is some system to share any income that gets derived (not sure how it worked). You find someone's song page, download the existing tracks (stems) and work on your own, uploading to the collection when you are finished. I collaborated with some artists and it was fun and I met some folks. They set up payments but I never expected anything to come from that. I thought finding projects that are interesting to collaborate on was difficult. It's just a big pile of music of varying quality and genres.
The "Unity Asset Store" is effectively Splice
But the licensing doesn't do pay outs, with sampling you pay once and its yours to use as you see fit. As it should be, we don't need anyone else sticking their hands out.
In general, imo, if somebody contributes usefully to a project they should get paid in line with their contribution.
The flat rate makes sense from an era when tracking that sort of stuff was difficult, but I dunno, it seems like it ought to be possible to track this sort of stuff automatically nowadays.
Ampwall is also a thing, a public benefit company - https://ampwall.com/
I like it! Why aren't there more creator owned platforms?
I think silicon valley actually LIKES founder fiefdoms. Not really the same spirit as worker cooperatives. The cap table is the game.
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.
I’ve got both artist and fan accounts. I’ve not noticed any significant change in service or tools in this whole period of change. The one thing that’s new is “listening parties”, but that seems fairly “on-beand” to me. BC was profitable for years prior to the first sale. Why mess with something that works?
I haven't notice any degradation so far. Recently they even announced a Bandcamp Friday - a day when a Bandcamp commission is 0 and all income from sales goes to the artists. Doesn't look like they try to squeeze as much profits as possible and slowly kill the platform in doing so.
I think that's been going on since early 2020. And yeah, I can't really tell a difference between Bandcamp before it was sold and today. It's a shame that they not only sold to Epic of all companies but then fired so many people.
This sounds like enshittification itself, in its own way. Rotating hands to the highest bidder.
Finally, a website that convinced me to write my own CSS overrides.