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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
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.
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?
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,…
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.
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.
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.
This is so awesome. Not because it will necessarily work or be incorruptible, but because it can be replicated.
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.