Why I’ve kept a tab on Subvert.fm for two years:

Further than its mission statement to become “the next-gen Bandcamp,” Subvert can be described as an artist-owned, democratically-governed, online music marketplace startup and platform cooperative. Explaining what that means in greater detail takes something like a 134-page zine. If that sounds interesting or you’re like, “no problem, I eat manifestos for breakfast,” I recommend perusing Subvert’s ambitious Plan for the Aritst-Owned Internet, designed by founder/owner/worker-member Austin Robey, or checking out their more succinct About page/FAQ as a resource to grasp Subvert’s goals on the whole.

-While these points are outlined at length in The Plan^, to accelerate the learning curve, here are some of my key takeaways on what distinguishes Subvert from a technical, political, and conceptual point of view.

>The Technical:

According to the zine, the initial stages and strategy of development for Subvert (from a startup standpoint) are reserved for emulating Bandcamp’s technical infrastructure and UI to attract new users during earlier phases. For now, in principle, Subvert functions effectively the same as BC: upload your music, update your metadata, customize your page, etc.²

Ideally, however, once the platform reaches a certain scale of security, visibility, and viability, this “lookalike” phase and the intersection between the two begins to dissolve, giving way to a new cosmetics and unique set of tools and features. In the meantime, this helps position Subvert as BC’s largest marketplace competitor, at least until it clears a few more milestones on the blazing trail to ‘subverting’ ye-old Bandcamp.

>The Political:

By “political,” I don’t mean the sort of macro, geonational politics on the news, but a very microcosm-scale governance setup specifically tailored to Subvert. To elaborate, one of the core distinctions between Subvert and Bandcamp is the answer to the question, “who owns the platform?” For Bandcamp, and for that matter, many other platforms that meet a similar fate, the response is usually rooted in private equity. No doubt, the enshittification of such platforms is in large part due to structures that permit profit-driven incentives to inevitably corrupt their utility in bigger and bigger buyouts with no say from the users who are affected.

For Subvert and its flavor of platform cooperativisim,³ the answer is that all classes of membership, including artists, labels, and supporters, are equal owners and shareholders in the company, marking a collective effort of resilience to help protect against, if not purge, the problem of platform decay. For example, in July 2025, Subvert turned down $200,000 in VC⁴ because the investor asked for a seat on the election board (HUGE 🚩). In remaining financially transparent and rooted in cooperativist principles, SV spun a full 180° from PE platforms, where most deals are done under the table and which tend to end up screwing over the userbase.

Further to its credit, via democratic polls and board elections, each member of Subvert is given a voice to vote on the direction that the co-op takes as it grows, including major decisions on matters of finance, development, or policy, and more importantly, accountability whenever mistakes are made. For more info on how governance works on Subvert, jump in here.

Side note—in recent decades, the world has already witnessed the emergence of several successful large-scale LCAs. For one, Tertulia, a online book retailer co-owned by readers, has been going steady since 2022. I’m not a member there, but my experience buying books on Tertulia has been smooth af, and they’re competitively-priced, too. It has quickly become a go-to site for stuff local brick-and-mortars don’t carry—take my word for it, I worked in a bookstore!⁵ Another example is in Spain, which is home to the world’s longest-standing successful irl cooperative, Mondragon.⁶ The founder of Subvert even visited there and took notes.

>The Conceptual:

Part of what has kept Bandcamp running all these years (and why it was upsetting when it sold out) is that it provides independent or unsigned artists with a legitimate, streamlined venue for connecting with their audience, acting as a de facto newsletter and virtual storefront for direct patronage, and helping stoke music culture in editorials and events through the likes of BC Daily and BC Friday,⁷ both of which have declined in quality after the Songtradr restructuring. In stark contrast to the highly-bottlenecked, inequitable streaming giants many elect for listening, BC seems to offer a breath of fresh air, something genuinely pro-artist and not pro-rata for once.

At face value, this sounds like a sweet deal, and yet…it’s not the best that it can be. Ever since it was turned over to the idle hands of venture capitalists, community feedback on Bandcamp has been met with a brickwall; now, significant moves are increasingly informed by the motives of outside investors without any input from the artists, let alone the staff. To a greater extent, this plays out like layoffs, outsourced support, microtransactions, and feature creep.

Conversely, on Subvert, unfettered flexibility of community feedback is not only permitted, but encouraged, enabling a much higher ceiling of potential for development. Not to mention no ads, no bloat, no ‘premiums’ or ‘pros,’ no platform fees at checkout (board vote),⁸ no AI sludge (policy drafted by member input), and crucially, no platform decay: clean and simple.

Plus, Subvert can expand on things that Bandcamp was genuinely doing well. To sample some of the forum chatter, stuff like radio discovery, audience interaction, Bandcamp Friday every day, enhanced listening parties, songwriting contests, and location-based discovery aren’t a far shot away. One of my favorite pages of the zine is a diagram of SV’s “Prism of Possibilities” (pg. 112), a blueprint for speculating where the co-op could end up in the future, ranging from the grander longterm (i.e. irl venue spaces) to the more practical short-term (i.e. personally-curated editorials). It’s as if, once anchored against the possibility of enshittification, all other possibilities become real.

Nowadays, there is an overwhelmening number of various online venues to choose from when it comes listening to music. And if you already pay for an Apple Music or Spotify subscription, why should you hit skip on streaming in favor of tuning in on Subvert.fm? Of course, it doesn’t need to be reduced to one or the other, but maybe outlining some benefits of listening on Subvert as opposed to other platforms can help inform your decision about how to best support musicians in the modern era.

>Quality playback:

Similar to Bandcamp, Subvert features lossless, un-normalized streaming. Unlike other popular platforms, which tend to use lossy compression for quicker queues and enable normalization by default for setting levels to a standard loudness between songs, Subvert respects the original quality of the work, unadulterated by compression or normalization, so you can stream and download it exactly how it was made to sound by the artist.

>Collections:

Very much like the concept of playlists on streaming platforms, you can build your own personalized collection of tracks, albums, and artists! What’s more, you can customize them with little annotations, adding a banner image, and sharing with others. It’s a neat tool for discovery, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, as there is much more planned for having fun with collections in the future (buying something on someone else’s wishlist, for example.)

>An ethical alternative:

It’s not my intention to guilt trip readers or convince you about what is “ethical” in any liberal, patronizing sort of way. If you get your music from streaming DSPs, no judgment—you can definitely use both, and where you listen isn’t a huge deal in the grand scheme. If, however, you like to be mindful about the way you consume music, it is to the best of benefit, between fans, musicians, and the platform, when you choose Subvert. For artists, SV extends a great deal of control and transparency for uploading and promoting work; for fans, it provides an opportunity for directly supporting artists you enjoy as well as discovering more marginal music without any subscription or compulsory fees; and the platform itself gains by voluntary contributions and continuing to accomodate artists’ requests/needs. For these reasons and more, Subvert exists as the most ethical digital marketplace for music and best value for all parties involved.

>Vs. streaming:

Over the past decade, Spotify and Apple Music have slowly stole the show for access to music, offering a Babel-esque catalogue with so many juicy impulse features that almost anything else less-convenient feels regressive by comparison. It also tends to reshape one’s relationship to music listening, arguably in a detrimental way. One of my first articles on (In)Sitze examines the way in which music streaming has altered my listening habits since I started using Spotify in college. Check out that post—perhaps you can relate? Anyway, it eventually led me to adopt my own discovery system, described more in the article About My Roundabout Music-Listening M.O. Bottom line, even though I still use Apple Music for a lot of stuff as a listener, Subvert is gradually becoming my preferred means for cultivating a healthier relationship to music listening.

>How to join:

To become a co-owner of Subvert as a supporter, artist, or label member, follow the link here.

There’s a lot to be excited about with building a platform like Subvert; the prospects beam out in near-quixotic abandon. Although there is no stock for trade in this LCA, I feel good to put stock into the platform as a go-to digital storefront for promoting my music.

>How do I intend to use Subvert moving ahead?

Because I joined as a founding member (before public launch), I had the benefit of preparing an artist page, so once SV goes live on May 12th, it will already offer my full catalogue from Bandcamp and Soundcloud.

**The price of my songs is discounted on Subvert. Some tracks are even free for members. I did that in the hopes that it encourages people to buy from the co-op instead of Bandcamp and over time, establishes itself as my main storefront. And with the money you saved, you might like to support the platform at checkout, which would also be dope!**

**the fotoplayer jams, which I have been uploading to Bandcamp and Soundcloud, will soon find their home on a dedicated artist page on Subvert. Since their uploading process is already miles ahead of BC, the two places you’ll be able to stream the audio prints in the future (besides directly in the YouTube VOD) will be on Subvert and Soundcloud. I plan to utilize “collections” to arrange some of my personal favorite jams from the past year with written annotations: stay tuned for “fotoplayer footnotes“!

–Subvert offers exclusives—songs you can’t find on any other platform. Your next favorite track might be one of them!

One of the things I find most interesting about Subvert’s ethos is how it frames its opposition beyond the marketplace and conducts it around the fabric of humanity itself. For example, throughout the zine, “cynicism,” not necessarily Bandcamp or other competing online music platforms, is referenced as the core, common threat to success. Granted, it’s a bit abstract to be competing with what comes down to an internal attitude toward the world, but it’s true; the corrosive force of cynicism is where we (members) need to be the most wary about coming apart before getting the chance to stick around.

And, in a collective comprised of very independent-minded, unique individuals, fatigued and frustrated by the systematic failures of related enterprises, volunteering to leave your weapons at the door in good faith is a monumental challenge, especially now on a techno-feudal worldwide web, where suspicion reigns as the capital mindset. At the same time, setting down skepticism to build trust and transparency is a large part of what makes the prospect of Subvert so refreshing, novel, and even exciting. For decades, the narrative of the music industry has always revolved around various conflicts like label vs. artist, analogue vs. digital, venues vs. PROs, platforms vs. enshittification, and so on. Even so, the splitshot mechanisms from such historical divisions have consequently (and justifiably) recoiled into a cyclone of cynicism on behalf of the exploited, becoming a large part of their defense systems. While that may have sufficed in some fractional improvements over the years, pointing pitchforks at the oppressor only functions within the context of such hierarchical dichotomies; it would be nonsensical and ineffective to point them at each other at a lateral level when it would be smarter to use them to till the grounds and cultivate a longterm support system for all walks of musicians. In my mind, this is what makes it a true “subversion.”

No matter the outcome, it has been cool watching the platform and people on the platform come together, let alone being able to participate in the praxis of one high-hanging fruit. It is that sense of being a part of something larger than myself on an equal plane with others, seeding something from the ground up, executing an experiment with potential for seminal results. I hesitate to use the term “revolutionary” and deliberately dodge around Marxist vernacular not because I’m leery about what the platform can achieve, but because they are perhaps a hyperbolic and misguided sense of what is truly being “subverted” and may run into the difficulty of backfiring on in the cyclical way that many historical “revolutions” tend to take.

scale, etc.