This, uh, is not a good sign.

So, anyway, while I’m not planning on dropping Bandcamp entirely just yet (and will still be uploading my new releases there for the foreseeable future), here’s some of the other places I sell my music.

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.

Subvert is getting a lot of hype because it’s new but I don’t see it as my long-term solution for music sales. I’m not sure what I’d consider to be my primary platform right now (probably Mirlo), but in the long term I think the future is self-hosting and self-distributing.

The current state of things

So, right now there are a whole bunch of indie music stores. The ones I currently have a presence on include:

• Bandcamp
• itch.io
• Mirlo
• Subvert

And additionally when I want to put stuff into streaming I have to also upload it to

• Symphonic (for the mainstream platforms)
• Bandwagon (to get it on TheIndieBeat and other things)
• KVRR

That’s a lot of things to have to upload my stuff to, each one requiring separate metadata setups and agreements and so on, and frankly, it’s super tiring.

Canimus

What I really want is a future where people can self-host their stuff with their publishing engine of choice (Faircamp or Publ or whatever), trivially sell their downloads, and from their own site also get their stuff circulated in the various discovery feeds out there.

This idea was the impetus behind Canimus, a protocol for sharing collection metadata in a lightweight, platform-agnostic manner.

Basically, the idea of Canimus is the following:

• Music publishers can provide a collection (also known as a “feed”) as a simple JSON format that includes albums, tracks, titles, purchase links, and streaming preview links
• Music collectors can provide an access-controlled collection
• Listeners can link their player application (web-based or otherwise) to multiple collections
• The player application can also provide feeds of peoples' listening activities and use that to build federated discovery and recommendations (by people following each other there as well)

And all of this just lives natively on the web.

Right now, Fairplayer is a thing that’s in development that shares many of the same goals as me. They’re working on specifically supporting Faircamp websites as a streaming music source, but I’ve also been in communication with them regarding Canimus, and similarly the folks behind Mirlo also share these goals. We’ve been talking a lot about some of the ways that things can move forward.

This website already has a Canimus feed. I also added one to Song Fight!. At some point I want to make a plugin thingy so that FairCamp users can easily add a Canimus feed to their sites (although maybe the Fairplayer folks are already working on that? I need to touch base with them).

Funkwhale and ActivityPub and such

Whenever I talk about this stuff I always get people insisting that I should really be looking into ActivityPub and specifically Funkwhale. The promise is always that ActivityPub is somehow a magical protocol that solves all these issues, but only with a lot of hand-waving. The thing is that ActivityPub doesn’t actually solve any issues; it just pushes them down the stack, in ways that are even less approachable for everyday people.

ActivityPub things don’t just naturally interoperate. Heck, Funkwhale 2.0 won’t even talk to Funkwhale 1.0!

In order to actually build interoperability between things, the process involves building a FEP, a process that is arduous and results in a specification at the end that is very difficult to navigate or even find. Supposedly there are existing FEPs for music sharing and discovery, but damned if I can find any of them myself! They’re all just opaque numbers.

And everything ActivityPub seems to really want to use push-based notifications for all data exchange. Forget about backfilling, as well. It turns everything into a stream of ephemera, and requires two-way handshakes and peering relationships and, in many cases, PGP key exchanges. It’s a mess and trying to support anything in ActivityPub on a static website is pretty much a lost cause. Also the idea of being able to move to a new domain, or host the same site on multiple domains, is a lost cause. And every single means of interacting with ActivityPub stuff requires building yet another identity on whatever single-purpose service consumes it. Like, it’s not like it makes any sense to follow a Funkwhale user from a PeerTube user. You can do it but what information gets exchanged?

Basically, ActivityPub is full of a bunch of empty promises, and in order to fulfill the promise you have to write another protocol on top of it, get everyone to agree to that protocol, and fit it into a shape that might not work for things to begin with.

I just really don’t see what it brings to the table, in any practical terms.

The future is indie and distributed

Right now things are such a mess. Fragmentation of streaming services, the downplaying and outright dismissal of the idea of owning music, myriad platforms that want to be the only platform that anyone uses for all the things, and everything being funded by the endless churn of venture capital and rent-seeking.

And musicians end up needing to spend so much time trying to feed these platforms.

We each only have so much time to spend here on this Earth, and personally I’d rather not be spending it on repetitive tedium like having to re-upload and re-format my music based on the historical artifacts of a dying industry.

My vision for the future of how people publish music:

1. The musician posts the music on their website using whatever tools (Faircamp, Bandcrash, etc.) and payment mechanisms (or lack thereof) work best for them
2. The music goes out in their own sharing feed
3. Their fans listen to it, buy it (or otherwise send payments to the musicians they want to support), add it to their collections, populate it into whatever distributed discovery mechanisms emerge, use whatever compatible player/receiver/streaming service makes the most sense for them

There is no need in this world for investors or rent-seeking platforms that exist to be The One And Only Thing. Protocols emerge and evolve and change and adapt based on the actual needs as they shift. People can focus on being creative and finding things they love, and not have to worry about where they’re doing it.

The web itself can be a perfectly good platform for all this stuff. Let’s try to make it happen.

Of course, if you’d prefer to support me on a platform other than Bandcamp, the same discography is available for about the same price over on Mirlo, and also my artist page on Subvert has recently been activated as well, although my entire discography is not up there just yet.

And if you prefer physical media that can be arranged, and if you want to go a bit more analog, there’s a place for that too.

Anyway, this month I actually do have a new release, although it isn’t much of one, and it’s also pay-what-you-want-including-$0.

As far as other stuff goes, I unfortunately haven’t made any progress on the next album due to some ongoing health issues, but those seem to be resolving (or at least abating) so hopefully I can spend some time in the studio again.