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It might sound weird to say this about the impact of a website, but Bandcamp really has transformed my musical interests and, as a result, my life. I have been able to cultivate & help support a small, shifting, virtual community of artists and listeners that I learned from over the past 13 years. So, it is very sad to hear about the recent sell-off, layoffs and plunder.
cc/ @bandcampunited
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This post from @pettter has me wondering if there are any efforts yet to start to think about what a similar #coop run service might look like?
https://mastodon.acc.umu.se/@pettter/111249022267794376
It seems like Bandcamp is past the startup stage where it could #ExitToCommunity?
https://www.colorado.edu/lab/medlab/2020/08/31/exit-community-community-primer
As much as I personally align with decentralization, there does seem to be some value in a centralized platform for managing payments, storage and discovery for artists whose livelihood depends on trust.
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If anyone has any leads for how to tap into, or start, a conversation about what a #coop run music platform like bandcamp could look like please let me know.
It seems like there must be a very large number of people who would be supportive of a cooperatively run AND FUN site like Bandcamp, that was self sustaining, supported artists, supported its workers, and had a clear governance model.
If it was open-source and could federate that would be great of course too. But first things first.
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Nick 
@edsu check out https://retro.social/@ajroach42/111252007152556212 too if you haven't seen that already
@nick thanks Nick! I know tech is going to tech, but I will be interested to see if some of these efforts frontload the governance side of things and then get into how to assemble the various pieces. As much of a fan I am of decentralization, I think it needs to take a back seat to how the thing will be run once money starts moving around?
@edsu this is actually one persons analysis of why resonate failed to achieve their goals:
"I’ve always kind of had the opinion that Resonate does some amazing conceptual co-operative governance but that governance was way ahead of what the product (software) actually offered."
https://community.resonate.coop/t/addressing-our-current-crisis-community-input-needed/3605/9
@edsu much open source software seems to start by an initial burst of development "unencumbered" by process...
.. but whether it can later be community owned/run is unclear.
There are many pitfalls with either approach, community now vs later....
@nick interesting, yeah -- that's a good reminder that it's likely a sociotechnical problem that requires thinking about both governance and tooling at the same time. Thanks for the pointer to look closer at what is going on w/ Resonate.
@edsu I think resonate is a really great case study of the challenges in getting co-operative alternatives up and running.
I don't know if there is a proper write up of it somewhere to learn from, there should be... probably many different perspectives though... so much to learn from failure.
A while back I spent a while reading around on the forum to get a sense of what happened, sad times!
@nick I would read that blog post from you :-)
@edsu I'm so peripheral to the project (i.e. of no connection at all), and it would be quite some effort to do a fair job of it given the complexity of what seemed to happen. Maybe someone else could :)
@nick yeah understood ... this has been helpful what you've written so far, so thank you for doing that reading and sharing it here.
@nick the analogy to mastodon in that post is interesting. What if there was software that looked and worked *exactly* like Bandcamp, and there was a flagship instance run as a coop? They've already demonstrated that it works from a usability perspective, but failed on the side of making it sustainable for artists, fans and workers.
(Oh and it's open source and could federate, yadayadayada)