Currently, my favourite platform to buy music is Bandcamp. It’s unique (*starts tearing up) in the music industry: it’s good for artists and profitable with amazing editorial content. They take a small percentage of the sales as a fee but are the most artist-centric music-sharing platform. I love that artists and labels can set the price of the music they sell and we can sell physical music and merch.

Their editorial team highlights anything and everyone and is a great source for new music. The quality of music is high and can boost artists into the limelight. You just need to make good music. Not commercial music. It’s great for discovering new music.

It was one of the few free havens in the music industry where corporates didn’t rule yet. Was because in March 2022 the platform was bought by Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, and owned by Tencent, the world’s largest video game vendor. They are as big as corporate money gets and have no business in music when they purchased Bandcamp so why did a video game company buy a music retailer? A little over a year later the sad answer came and it was to make a bit of money as they sold Bandcamp to Songtradr upon which Songtradr decided to fire half of Bandcamp’s staff.

So there we went with big money taking over an important music platform and setting in the enshittification* of the platform. This is the official term for when platforms start putting money before users. It’s the reason you’re not using Facebook anymore. Platforms attract users by making a nice product, then they prioritise commercial parties over users so they can sell whatever crap they sell, and in the end, it’s just a game of making the most money for shareholders.

I haven’t noticed the platform getting worse but these are signs the process has started. If Songtradr falls or decides it needs money from Bandcamp, there’s nothing we, the users, can do to protect the libraries full of music we bought. We have no say in what’s going on.

Enter Subvert. The artist and user-owned successor to Bandcamp. They are working their ass off now to get everything ready to launch this year and they are doing interviewers with founding members to get industry feedback to make the project a success. I am one of them and had the honour of talking to founder Austin Robey* about what they are doing and the structure cooperative structure that forms the basis of this project.

So what does this mean in practice? Well, it’s simple, we own and control the platform. It might sound crazy but these are amazing steps towards preserving the cultural ideas behind Bandcamp and I highly recommend you check them out for yourself. Subscribe to their newsletter if music and culture are important to you and consider investing in this amazing project.