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Radicalized by Bandcamp
"The goal is to construct something that can outlast all of its members."
Daisy Alioto in conversation with Subvert founder Austin Robey. Plus some good links from Daisy.
Bandcamp was supposed to be the future. Want to support your favorite musicians and know the money’s going directly to them? Buy their records on Bandcamp Friday! And while fan support can only take you so far (it can’t provide healthcare, as Chappell Roan pointed out in her victory speech at this year’s Grammys), during the early weeks and months of the pandemic—when it looked like the entire music industry might collapse into the vacuum left behind by touring dollars—indie artists and listeners alike looked for salvation anywhere we could find it.
But Austin Robey was never quite so optimistic. “I was a lonely voice in 2020,” he recently told Daisy Alioto, “feeling very uncomfortable when Bandcamp was being held up as the sterling example of an equitable future in contrast to the negative sentiments towards Spotify.” Robey is the founder of Subvert, a collectively-owned music distribution platform founded in response to Bandcamp’s back-to-back acquisitions by Epic Games and Songtradr. He and Daisy discussed platform cooperatives, inverting the traditional company structure, and fundraising via $100 dollar zines. —Walden Green
The following interview has been edited and condensed.
Daisy Alioto: You're incorporated as a limited cooperative association. And investors can still have shares.
Austin Robey: Our innovation here is having two legal entities. So we have a co-op, which I'm a member of. There are 2,600 members now. This co-op owns all of the founding shares of a corporation, and there's an agreement between these two entities which details their relationship. The corporation is where all the IP sits—the brand, the code of the platform, the trademarks, the copyrights. So the corporation owns the platform, we own the corporation, and there's a licensing agreement back and forth that allows us to raise money in ways that are more traditional. And then we have this internal point system that's a measurement of patronage. In a co-op, patronage is a measurement of how much each member engages with the business. So REI is a co-op, and your patronage is a direct relationship to how much money you spend at the store that year.
For Subvert, we're measuring a lot more things. How much money did this member earn on the platform? How much money did this user spend on the platform? Does this user pay more than the asking price? Have a generosity score? Are they engaged with the forum? And so each quarter, the idea is to retroactively reward 1 million ownership points. And those points represent a proportional share of the co-op's assets in a liquidity event. We're going to show in the platform how many ownership points a user has, and also be able to do a back of the napkin map by getting a third-party valuation every quarter and saying, ‘This many points is valued at this much.’
DA: Can you define platform cooperatives for somebody who might not be familiar with that concept?
AR: Platform cooperatives apply the logic of co-ops to the web. The basic underlying idea is how users can capture the value they create. This idea started in more academic circles. I see it as a deep structural intervention into how platforms can work. Like, “What would Uber be like if it were owned by its drivers? What would TaskRabbit be like if it was owned by the people that actually did the work?” And in the case of Uber, how much value did the first 100 drivers create? A lot. And how much of that did they capture? None. So it's like re-imagining a social contract for platforms and taking this older model that people typically associate with food co-ops—like smaller brick and mortar businesses—but applying it to scalable web platforms.
What would Uber be like if it were owned by its drivers? What would TaskRabbit be like if it was owned by the people that actually did the work?
DA: What sorts of governance decisions do members make in Subvert specifically?
AR: In co-op governance, all members would typically vote on three things: the dissolution of a company, electing board representatives, and changing the bylaws. That's the minimum kinds of decision that all members vote on. For us, governance means accountability. One of the primary responsibilities they have is electing a board that represents their constituent interests. It's like a representative democracy that is above leadership and can fire who's in charge. It's an inversion of a traditional company; it's like the members are really the boss—they select the board. So there's a baked-in accountability that is often not found at traditional organizations. In this case, we have planned our first board election in April, and that board could fire me. I think that's important to have in place. This is not about a particular person, it's about the roles and procedures. The goal is to construct something that can outlast all of its members, that's not reliant on one person. So I would see myself as in this seat for now, and that would mean I have to earn the continued trust of members.
DA: I was intrigued by your decision to sell a hundred-dollar zine, but have that represent membership. It's really smart and it helps people who have subscription or membership fatigue to get jogged out of that groove. I was curious about how you arrived at that. Was it inspired by something else you saw somebody do?
AR: It was over a year ago where I tweeted out just an idea that was like, “Oh, what would be a cool way to bootstrap a co-op, is to publish the business plan as a zine and try to sell a thousand copies for a hundred dollars each.” And I think that shower thought stuck with me. It’s just reverse engineering the math of a thousand memberships. If a thousand people purchase a hundred-dollar membership, that's a hundred thousand dollars. It's also like a brand document, so it orients people to what this is trying to accomplish. It gives people confidence that there's real thought put in. It's meant to be treated as something that could be an art object. So each one of them is hand numbered, it's in this custom embossed packaging with a custom membership certificate. So yeah, it's meant to do a lot of things. Funding is one of them. It has been super helpful in this early process where we don't have outside funding to get things moving without having to ask anyone for permission. But then it also helped build a kind of affinity where people feel proud to be a part of something.
If a thousand people purchase a hundred-dollar membership, that's a hundred thousand dollars.
DA: You mentioned Bandcamp as what not to do. Why was Bandcamp such a radicalizing moment for you?
AR: Well, I was a lonely voice in 2020, feeling very uncomfortable when Bandcamp was being held up as the sterling example of an equitable future in contrast to the negative sentiments towards Spotify. You could look at how much friendly press they'd received, how much community goodwill. To me, this company was never really open about finances. It seemed like a cynical view of the future to think that that's the best that we could do. That always bothered me. I was on a panel with Joe Holt, who was one of the Bandcamp founders in 2020, and after that, I had a one-on-one call with him, and I tried to convince him to transition Bandcamp into a worker co-op. I started the conversation by asking, “Do you have a succession plan?” I was trying to convince him that this is a viable path for a graceful exit, that you could find a financial partner to fund a leverage buyout and transition ownership to the workers. I saw that idea as a way to put an exclamation point on a legacy. What we've seen is a fulfillment of its obvious conclusion. It's like the community goodwill didn't matter at all. There was no town hall or anything, just a blog: here's what happened. The company was sold once to Epic Games, and was sold again to a music licensing company. It upset a lot of people, but I think it shows how little good intentions matter and how this is an inevitable instinct unless companies are structured differently.
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PLAYBACK
Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.
Dirt contributor Terry Nguyen profiles Industry’s finance daddy Ken Leung (Highsnobiety)
In the wake of last night’s Brutalist win for Daniel Blumberg’s score, read Fran Hoepfner on “The Death of the Classic Film Score” (Vulture)
Who is buying all the stuff? Unsurprisingly, rich people (Bloomberg)
NBC will launch a short- and long-form subscription video service later this year (AdWeek)
Michèle Lamy’s new fragrance comes in a camel-hair lined wooden box
“You have to admit that for someone whose entire appeal is based on their supposed artistry, Kendrick is a fairly artless rapper.” Drew Millard comes in hot
Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal interview the co-heads of the Goldman Sachs Institute on Unprecedented Geopolitical Risks (Odd Lots Podcast)
Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal’s Acquired tackles Rolex.
R.I.P. Skype, 2003-2025 (The Verge)
Token of Appreciation by Boldy James and Chuck Strangers (Spotify)
SAYA by Saya Gray (Spotify)
MIXTAPE
Good links from the Dirtyverse.
“She especially likes inviting customers to ‘jiggle’ and dance with her as she pretends to ‘cook’ their plush pancakes.” Liza Corsillo spent three hours at the FAO Schwartz Jellycat Diner for The Strategist.
Can Madewell retain its customer base as they grow into middle age? (Puck)
A sad-then funny-then sad again story by Peter Coviello (Public Books)
Clare Bucknell on tennis purists and the sport’s surprisingly modern history (Granta)
The age-old struggle: man (Tyler Cowen) vs. technology (The Economist)
"Working mothers today devote more time to active child care than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations." (New Yorker)
Mexican fashion designers brace for the impact of Trump’s tariffs (De Los)
The faces of trans America, photographed and interviewed by DAZED
More than 1/3 of land in the U.S. is administered by federal agencies—what should we be doing with it? (Defector)
“Building software this way—describing a problem in a sentence or two, then watching a powerful A.I. model go to work building a custom tool to solve it—is a mind-blowing experience.” Kevin Roose on “Vibecoding” (New York Times)
Cat Zhang on the Fragrantica warriors of PerfumeTok (The Cut)
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