Zoë Keating linked to Subvert.fm (because she’s running for a seat on its board), and as a long-time appreciator of Zoë’s fight for independence as an artist, I was immediately intrigued.

Then I found this on their About page:

We are building a cooperative-owned music marketplace today, with the larger ambition of becoming a Mondragón of Music: a constellation of community-owned ventures that form the foundation of an alternative economy owned by artists and workers.

And now they really, really have my attention.

I expect I’ll publish my catalog there after reading through their legal structure in detail, and if it goes well I will likely recommend it as the new “best place to get my music”.

P. S. Digging up that Winning Slowly episode led me to this old Ben Thompson post: what a jarring contrast that is to read compared to Ben’s turn in the past half decade to insistently defend Big Tech’s “economically rational” business choices no matter how they hurt the indies.

Edit: This is slightly unfair to Ben, who has continued to articulate the value of niches in the intervening timespan. But only slightly, because he has spent so much of his time articulating (and often justifying) big business choices. It’s not, as far as I can tell, that he doesn’t believe what he wrote about Keating over a decade ago, so much as that his emphasis has shifted significantly. But shifts in emphasis matter!