Subvert.fm: A Consumer Cooperative For Music Downloads

*You can always quit buying from exploitative corporations.*

I have been involved with cooperatives since my college days, organizing student housing coops at the university.

That’s a long time ago.

I’ve organized and worked with several cooperative business and projects since then, and would certainly be up for more.

I’ve written here about cooperatives as a good way to replace the functions served by the investor and business classes, since their involvement tends to result in all the ownership and benefits going to them and the workers ending up with only a salary.

Heck, my father was working with bean farmers coops when I was just a kid.

And that’s a very long time ago.

So I was really happy to see Subvert.fm launch this spring.

Subvert is a consumer coop, organized similarly to REI, which is not my favorite cooperative model. REI, for example, has had some significant issues with worker relations. See the REI union for more on that.

I’d personally prefer some hybrid model that blends a consumer coop with a workers’ coop, maybe something like a partnership where the consumer coop owns the branding and business side but the worker coop owns the intellectual property and production side. Something that at least tries to balance the competing interests involved.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a good start.

Subvert is, basically, a storefront for musicians to sell downloadable music; anyone can join the coop, but you don’t need to be a member to buy music through the site. (Though musicians can set a member discount on their prices, and most seem to do that.)

It’s most similar to Bandcamp, which is a pretty good system and has a history of being good to the musicians but has lately tended towards being not good to its workers.

The site itself works reasonably well, though like Bandcamp it definitely needs a good engine for recommending new music. But on the other hand, also like Bandcamp, it’s very generous about letting you listen to music before you buy it.

So give it a try.

It’s a comparable-quality system to the offerings from other companies, pays 100% of the sticker price to the musicians and is a much better organizational design.

I joined.