Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace
subvert.fm
subvert.fm
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.
> 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.
I’m all for decentralisation but blockchain ain’t it.
See also: NFT delisting.
I don't know if I need a website or a board for that. Of course I'm not the one building this, so my imagined design doesn't matter. But the question is: if not that, then what? I'm curious, I'm just gonna sleep on it before I decide that I'm $100 curious.
Edit: I see I can get the zine digitally first before deciding to be an owner. I guess I have some reading to do.
Reality: there's nothing that blockchain does better than an Excel sheet.
And no, payments for ransomware don't count. Illicit payments for CSAM and drugs also are not an example I'm looking for. And no, international sanctions busting is not a good example either. The same goes for Ponzi schemes.
If the artist-fan-trust-relationship is multi-hop, it may take a little while for the switch to propagate from fan-to-fan rather than from artist-to-fan, but when it does they'd be notified to consider making the same change.
Meanwhile, a timer has been going since the last time the artist collected funds from the account with the lost key. Once it gets suitably high, the pending payments into it are reversed back to the fans, and the pattern is altered to exclude the abandoned address and notify payers that they might be a better pattern to use, prompting them to find and use the new pattern.
It's not the simplest way, but it's the best I can do without having anybody on payroll, which means maximizing the amount received by the artists.
Besides, art is supposed to be transformative, not status-quo preserving. Even though 99% of artists don't have to worry about being censored directly, I think they're more likely to be interested in protecting the 1% who do. That means having both groups using the same payment rails, and they must be rails that don't respect the kind of bullies that freeze accounts based on content.
Finally, you can lean on this web of trust for the distribution of things like concert tickets, making life more difficult for scalpers (and you can identify the scaplers who have infiltrated your fan network, and explicitly distrust them for next time).
So basically: you're screwed.
> Besides, art is supposed to be transformative, not status-quo preserving.
Blah-blah-blah. I would really love to belong to a collective that puts my music right next to CSAM. Fans would really appreciate it. So now you have to have an enforcement mechanism, like voting. What if somebody hacks enough keys to take over the voting? Have even more privileged members?
That's the thing: the real-world complexity has to deal with all kinds of edge cases. And we have a legal system for that, with several thousand years of legacy in it.
What if an actor disappears and the timeout makes all the tracks unavailable until they are re-uploaded with a new key?
I can go on indefinitely. There's a reason "smart contracts" are now just another way of saying "scam", and why blockchain is only seriously pushed by scammers and criminals.
Same thing for managing user identity. Whether you want to build an organization around that problem or slap together a CLI and let the users fend for themselves, again not something I'm trying to weigh in on.
These are app-level decisions, not a protocol ones. And neither of them really lend themselves to on-chain solutions.
The unsolved problem I see here is that you've got a community of users, all with identical copies of a file, and they want to build consensus on how that file should "cite its sources". In the case of music, that's a bunch of fans wanting to pay the musicians, but it's structurally the same as if you're trying to give feedback to authors of a paper or claim that researcher X found vulnerability Y in code Z: you're building consensus on a directed graph between datasets and actors such that other actors have something to reference when they communicate (or send payments) to each other about those things.
That's the only part of the problem that's likely to come under attack by incumbents, so it's the only part you need a ruleset and computational verification for. Everything else can be handled "the normal way", by appealing to the good behavior of the incumbents.
People (e.g. Sony) are going to try to get paid for music they never played. People are going to take credit for research they didn't do (or did poorly). People are going to try to misrepresent the trustworthiness of things that they built and want to charge you for.
You can't put that on AWS because nothing on AWS is more trustworthy than its least trustworthy admin. You can't leave it to the courts because only the powerful can use the courts to their advantage, for the rest of us they only serve as a system for mutually assured destruction.
Which people get credit for which data is too contentious of a topic to trust to the hands of people who have pinky promised not to use it in their power games. If it weren't, there'd be no reason for Subvert to exist in the first place. I hope they can manage it by just being very careful about how they allocate trust among their owners, but history has given us centuries worth of reasons to be skeptical.
Meanwhile, other data that the powerful would prefer to tamper with remains intact in the various blockchains that protect it. The rules continue to be followed. There are a lot of problems with that space, especially at the interface between the rules-governed parts and the pinky-promise parts, but we've only been chipping away at those problems for decades. They feel a lot more tractable than anything involving the insufficiencies of the law.
There's a reason there are so few players, it's complicated once you go international. I would suggest going after the massive corpus of laws, but most are the to protect artists... they just do it in very different ways, and often pre-date the Internet.
Blockchain only sees hashes, so it has no way of knowing if that hash of a new song that was just uploaded is really a remix. But, if you solve this somehow (and I bet you can't in a way that can't be gamed), people can just distribute remixes outside of blockchain altogether. No blockchain is going to help you collect royalties from youtube stream.
Second, "money distribution for remixes without trusted parties" is not a very common problem. If contract participants want to cheat each other, they can do it easily by lying about number of listeners, they don't need to do something trivially detectable like messing with contract itself.
It seems to me that it is possible to implement fully decentralized bandcamp-like site.
(Not including things that just make early adopters rich or simply provide services to other crypto related projects).
Which means there is no extra trust from blockchain, it's just a gimmick.
However:
1. If someone approaches you and wants to buy your username, you can sell it without the need for trust in the buyer or a third party.
2. Consider this scenario: someone writes anonymously in a public channel and then Telegram removes the channel, and bans its username. If the author has an NFT associated with their username, they have a way to prove to the public that the new platform where they continue to post is indeed managed by the same person and not an impostor.
Therefore, there is additional value in using blockchain in this case.
1. You buy a username. Old owner contacts support and claims their computer was hacked and they didn't want to sell. Will you lose your new username? No matter what the answer is, you will have to trust Telegram LLC to honor that.
2. Or that person can get a website and advertise on channel. Or a Twitter/Mastodon/whatever account. Or if you want obscure tech, they can publish a public key (directly, without blockchain).
You can certainly plug blockchain in many places. Hey, you could hook up blockchain to your light switch and use L2 transactions to turn the light on!
The real question is: given the specific real problem, is blockchain the best solution? So far the answer is usually "no" (unless the question relates to avoiding laws)
So I'd rather stop argument here.
But I didn’t exclude commerce in my post above. Thanks for replying.
By opposition to crypto, which attracts distributed corruption when enough people use the project?
I'm being glib, but complaining that a project not using crypto makes it inherently unsafe is pretty rich.
But you've got to admit that its a peculiar rhetorical choice to explain at the landing page that your strategy doesn't involve coupling ownership/control of the platform with the ability to control tokens on a blockchain somewhere, without using the same space to explain what it does do instead.
Haven’t yet seen and canola where this crypto distributed network actually had benefits and wasn’t just a giant grift - to be fair I did not look very hard though.
They all have. They just claim they can work against social dynamics with technology but that's a fool errand.
In the more recent comparison, I remeber using the web in early 1990's, when it was less then 5 years old. (Fun fact: the images thing were still new, I remember each image had a "download" link in case yser's browser did not support them). It was already used, and had no analogies, and most importantly, the pages I were used were _not_ related to web or even CS, it was some physics thing.
It's time to accept reality: we've spent dozens of years and billions of dollars, and the most useful application is avoidance of financial controls. There is not going to be anything more.
For anyone interested in learning more, this is a reference to the National Cooperative Grocers and the role of UNFI (a primary distributor for many food coops) and CDS (a cooperative grocery consulting firm). I've been pretty involved in my local grocery cooperative's governance over the past two decades. From my vantage point, there's some truth to this, but also some exaggeration (or more accurately, the pinning of other grievances, which themselves might be legitimate, on something that might not actually be related).
I don't endorse or necessarily agree with the views expressed on these two websites, but they might help give some background:
https://organizing.work/2019/04/why-do-coops-hate-unions/
http://web.archive.org/web/20210213141044/http://www.takebac...
Additionally, I found the Carver Policy Governance model we followed effective and intriguing. FWIW "speak in one voice" on our board was a strength, meaning we worked out our differences of opinion on official matters in the board room, but were always free to voice our independent opinions as member-owners and expected to make it clear which "hat" we wore (board member vs. member-owner) when talking to members.
My quick gloss on Policy Governance - Basically you draft "Ends" that the organization follows (mission & values, etc.) and then prohibit what means the GM can take to enact them. Everything else is up to them, and if you're doing it right as a board you're paying VERY close attention to language and intentions, and chains of cause and effect (always keeping "bad GM" scenarios top of mind). The board is basically the legislature (and judiciary in times of need) to the GM's executive branch.
Maybe it's unique to the co-op I worked in - but a key part of being a board member was "Member Linkage" meaning that while the board couldn't directly enact the changes that members requested, it was 1000% our obligation to listen to them, give them space on agendas, and take these requests seriously. When I was involved, employees were encouraged to run for board seats, and AFAIK there has always been direct staff representation on the board before and after my tenure.
IANAL - But if a board member knowingly lets an outside entity change its bylaws in a way that negatively affects the co-op and its members - that is a breach of a board member's fiduciary duty for which they could be personally liable. Same - if an outside corporate stooge is installed on the board and prioritizes their outside biz' well-being over the co-op's, that would also be a breach of fiduciary duty. Also - if such a stooge ran for a board position and didn't disclose their business connection and intention to prioritize their employer's needs over the co-op's, that would be a blatantly clear conflict of interest that is grounds for immediate removal in any org with decent bylaws.
So - not calling BS on this, but something isn't quite adding up here in the articles linked.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1znV0Q8_jjxFTiKeT_FETTZieiXl...
Sounds like an opportunity for a binding arbitration clause, and hiring another co-op that performs binding arbitration.
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.
https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/aphex-twin-selected-ambient...
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!
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.
My favorite example is Seven Sirens And a Silver Tear from Sirenia, a Norwegian gothic metal band. There's no metal in that. It took me a long long time before I learned this but the track is a direct descendant of the Midlight Sonata. And I was hunting for similar songs and I now keep a playlist of them -- but if you started from Sirenia you would never find any of them.
The good news is that in the digital era you no longer need to fork over cash for an entire album or even an EP when you only care about one of the songs - which leaves more money available to buy music from other artists. I often wonder if in the long run it still balances out for artists, since the songs one person likes probably aren't the same as the songs another person likes, especially in niche genres.
Do you think online NNMF collaborative filtering with Spotify bands with fewer than 100,000 monthly listeners is the answer? If you had infinite resources, what would you do?
I wish I could give it more bands, and see the distance (I imagine it computes one?) between each band I provided and the ones it suggests.
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.
[0] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/
[1] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/https://subvert.fm/blog/our-50-year-roadmap-the-mondragon-of...
Are you sure you're talking about "good art" and not merely "professionally mixed and mastered recordings?"
It's one of the few uses where if the AI is wrong? oh well.
This - as a listener, quality is the hard problem. It is encouraging that the proposal affirms the value of curative functions (like labels).
As an artist, I actually don’t really care about music’s commercial problems - I’m more annoyed by the constraints on musical art objects inherent in all music platforms.
Like, experiencing art objects in a gallery hits different vs scrolling through bandcamp. The internet is, already, the gallery but it’s like we replaced all of the paintings with tiny prints, eclipsed by the placards.
The thing I would really love is a music platform that feels like a hosting platform, not a marketplace. Where a user can simultaneously act as a listener, an artist, a curator or a critic.
> The thing I would really love is a music platform that feels like a hosting platform, not a marketplace. Where a user can simultaneously act as a listener, an artist, a curator or a critic.
On Bandcamp: in addition to obviously following artists I like, I follow several fan accounts of those artists, then I can see what they buy. I also try to sample the Bandcamp album of the day.
On NTS.live I have a bunch of favourite hosts and try to listen to every show they release, and note the track listing. Too many to ever get through.
Podcasts: NPR All Songs Considered, and Resident Advisor when I can.
On Apple Music there's the algorithm. Hit or miss.
Back in the heydays of music blogs I would find a lot of great stuff on Hype Machine, but alas, I think those days are gone.
Just with these few sources I find there is far too much great new music to get through in one lifetime. Godspeed!
I have discovered at least as much good music on Bandcamp as I did in the early years of Beatport and before that in real-life record stores. You start with a genre you like, then just flick through all the new releases. If a cover or title catches your eye, pop it in and have a listen, if you don't like it, move on to the next. Maybe you missed a bunch of good stuff because it didn't catch your eye, but who cares? The point isn't to collect every amazing piece of music ever written, it's just to buy enough music that makes you happy.
After a while you might start to build up a mental map of which labels tend to release more stuff you like so you prioritize listening to their new releases over other labels. Or you find an artist you like and follow them onto different labels. Even indie artists who self-release everything often still do collabs with other artists, so you can find connected/related stuff that way too, or look at the way they self-describe and tag their own music then search round for those keywords too.
In my opinion it's much easier to discover music now than it was in the brick and mortar days primarily because of hyperlinks and search, but also because the new releases rack doesn't get cleaned out by the early birds, records aren't held behind the counter for favorite customers etc. Not to mention Discogs is still there for more mainstream stuff to drill down on aliases, guest appearances, producers etc. Every Bandcamp Friday I end up with a full cart and dozens of open tabs and it feels like an embarrassment of riches. I wouldn't know what to do with a recommendations engine on top of that.
I am thrilled with my music collection these days, it's got everything from janky noodlings by bedroom musicians who I was perhaps the only person who they ever got a sale from, to established artists with a couple decades of releases under their belts, to weird little microscenes centered around cities or countries I'll never visit. Sure, I dug through a ton of trash to get there, sometimes checking out reams of tracks by a promising artist only to find a single gem worth tossing over a few bucks for, but now I have it, and I treasure it! I love having a personalized collection that's entirely made up of tunes that I think are awesome. It's the fulfillment of teenage me's dream. I don't think discovering 10x as much music would make it any better - on the contrary, I wouldn't have time to really focus on and appreciate it all, in which case I might as well have just put a streaming playlist on in the background.
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?
The ZINE is publicly available: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ra6r2zSkw7NCYNTAqP9923ValZi...
The phrase "Collective ownership" sounds romantic but it can mean many things, from very good to outright scam, depending on implementation.
"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/
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.
A Collectively Owned Bandcamp Successor - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41309217 - Aug 2024 (2 comments)
However I do agree with your point overall, I'm struggling to see how this will not go the same path in a few years.
There's already some existing co-operative music store/bandcamp alternative projects that are selling music and accepting new artists.
https://jam.coop 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.
I'm also familiar with mirlo and ampwall who are working on similar projects.
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
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.
So essentially your music is just advertising for you to be able to sell merch LOL!
Why do artists feel the need for a platform?
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?
My model is this:
* Make some awesome music
* Self host it. Provide means for people to download your music (there are so many methods).
* Allow donations via reputable method
* Crowd fund for big events like creating physical releases, paying for studio time if you need to.
* Play as many gigs as you can/want to do
* Again fuck social media
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.
And then you have to compete with the major labels who are buying streams to get their artists in the big playlists.
Its a really cleaver system, you have all these services that you pay upfront and then if you actually do get any streams you get like 0.0001% of a cent.
Its a con, the only people getting paid are the platforms.
If you have to use any platform stick your music on youtube using the lowest quality mp3's and then link back to your own website.
Thousands of people you've never heard of have done exactly what you are talking about before returning to their ordinary life with their dreams unfulfilled.
Jerkasses come along and tell other people that they should do the same thing when they have no idea how much passion, time, effort, drive, and focus it takes to do such a thing or how it feels when you realize you've been screaming into the void.
Get a following first and then consider making your own website. It's okay to ladle from the mainstream as long as you don't dive in and never surface.
The point I’m making is this, these platforms aren’t made with the artist best interests in mind, they are created in order to create profit for the business.
It’s the same principle as being signed to a label. The artist is an employee who brings in revenue for the record label.
Read up about Steve Vai’s approach to the music industry.
You would never have listened to what he said had he not first signed with a record label and then released a best selling album that millions of people listened to.
Even if Vai was 1 in a million guitarist, that means there's about 8,000 Steve Vais on the planet right now and you would probably have a hard time identifying a single one of them that doesn't currently have a record deal and has their media on streaming sites.
I'm sorry that I'm sounding rude or dismissive, I'm just making the point that "going it alone" is not an option for anyone who wants to be successful in popular music.
Doing what you're doing is the equivalent of writing a novel and then photocopying and hand binding every copy for sale.
No need to gatekeep. There's both a use and a market for platforms. This does not invalidate the benefits of self-hosting, which many artists wouldn't even see.
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.
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.
Bandcamp didn't even accept people's credit card info (maybe it's changed in recent years and they have more payment options now). They outsourced payment processing to PayPal.
Most small shopping sites in USA don't handle their own payments due to regulations.
If there's no degradation, it should have been done long ago. Those salaries come out of musicians' pockets.