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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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If anyone has any leads for how to tap into, or start, a conversation about what a 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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Ed Summers

@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 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)