Sockpuppet Blog.

Mirlo

Mirlo has been around for a while, but they made some pretty great strides when the original issues with Bandcamp had started to happen. They are, currently, my favorite of the Bandcamp alternatives, for the following reasons:

• They actually care about artists and trying to make a better ecosystem for everyone
• Their principles are based on socialist collectivism
• Their long-term goal is to provide interoperability and a federated world so that they don’t have to be a single point of failure, business-wise, and are being developed as open source
• Their uploader is great (especially when paired with Bandcrash)
• They give artists a choice of how much of a cut they take
• They provide integrated merch sales (albeit with fairly clunky shipping setup), a fully-fledged artist blog (for those who need it), and monthly support options as well
• They support pay-what-you-want with both an absolute minimum and a suggested default

Things are still a bit rough with them in some places; for example, I don’t like how their frontend is currently a ReactJS app without any server-side rendering (which is bad for SEO and some forms of interop), and they still don’t currently have the ability to generate discount codes or do per-track artwork, but they’re constantly making progress, and ethically and politically they are about as far left as is possible in the space.

I really want to see them do well.

itch.io

itch.io is an independent games, assets, and content store. I actually first learned about them as a place to sell my comics, although they’re primarily used for games and tools.

They aren’t designed specifically to be a music store and leave a lot to be desired in the music sales department, but with Bandcrash it isn’t too difficult to manage your albums there.

Like Mirlo, they allow you to set whatever platform cut you like, and they also have flexible bundles and discount codes, which puts them a bit above Mirlo. They also let you organize your catalog into categories/sections. They also give you an incredible amount of control over your page layout, with the ability to provide custom CSS on request. And they even provide the ability to sell merch, although it’s pretty clunky to set up.

They also support pay-what-you-want with both absolute minimum and suggested default prices.

However, there are a few reasons why they don’t earn my top choice; for example:

• The company is very small and centralized, and has a very high bus factor
• Their interoperability is quite minimal and lacks a robust API for doing things that would be very helpful to do
• As they do not have a music focus, there are a lot of places where things could be better, especially with sales reporting and discovery

Still, as an independent digital asset shop (with potential merch sales), you could certainly do worse.

ko-fi

Ko-Fi started out as a Patreon alternative with a tip jar and monthly support options, but they also have a commissions platform and sales for both digital and physical items.

It’s pretty okay as a shopping cart, although handling physical and digital versions of things is a bit clunky as they have to be separate items (which means uploading the digital version twice, once for each version). Also, the only way to provide an audio preview on the shop itself is via a YouTube embed. To that end it works as a supplement for having your own website, but it’s not a great shopping experience. Also it offers absolutely no discoverability at all.

They don’t offer a flexible sales cut option, but the standard cut they take is a mere 5%, and you can choose to pay a small monthly fee to waive that.

They also do have discount codes, but they don’t have easily-managed discography bundles.

Also, they support pay-what-you-want with absolute minimum prices, although there’s no way of doing a suggested price.

Personally I focus on Ko-Fi for selling physical goods that aren’t music-related, but I do have all of my albums available there in digital form.

Subvert

This is a newcomer to the indie sales space. I’ve written a bit about them already.

They have some interesting ideas, namely instead of taking a cut they ask for customers to pay a tip to the platform to keep it running (similar to Gofundme), but I personally feel like they are prioritizing style over substance, and the actual upload and metadata editing process is a bit onerous.

There’s nothing about them that stands out in particular aside from the co-op business model and the customer-driven cut.

Like many other sites, they support pay-what-you-want with an absolute minimum; they also let you offer discounts to other co-op members, which is nice.

One notable missing feature is the ability to have hidden tracks on albums. There’s also no means of doing per-track artwork that I can find, which is something supported by both Bandcamp and Bandcrash.

I’m not focusing too heavily on Subvert, although I will probably continue to upload new releases there for now. I’m not super confident in their future but hopefully they’ll surprise me.

Places I am not interested in and why

I used to use Gumroad, but its founder, Sahil Lavingia, has a long history of problematic behavior. Additionally, Gumroad is now primarily AI-coded and supported.

I have also been receiving spam from various up-and-coming wannabe services that are being vibe-coded on platforms like zilla.so and so on. My thought on things like that is: if the promise is that you can start up a company based on just a notion that you don’t have to think about, why wouldn’t anyone else just do it themselves and cut out the middleman?

A note about web presence

Personally I think that any musician should have their own website that they run on their own terms, with whatever features make sense to them and with their own web domain and so on. I don’t believe in putting all your eggs in someone else’s basket.

I run this site using Publ (and I will someday get around to releasing my site templates to make it easier for someone else to do so). A lot of folks use Faircamp which has a lot going for it. You can also build a site with any number of site generators like 11ty, Hugo, or any number of static site generators. Heck, you could also hand-code it the old-fashioned way.

Even if you don’t want to build your own site, I highly recommend getting your own web domain and at least forwarding it to your favorite sales channel, or setting up a Linktree or Carrd to direct people to your preferred sites.