This is another potential cooperative alternative to bandcamp, similar to Subvert and Jam.coop. Uniquely, Mirlo appears to be working on integrating ActivityPub support, allowing it to join the Fediverse.
A neat aside; jam.coop, Ampwall, and Mirlo’s teams communicate and potentially collaborate with each other :) (Ampwall is not a cooperative though).
Bandcamp is the only worthwhile capitalist institution that I know of. It’s fucking cool and is the only rival out there to the streaming services. Why make an alternative? Why compete with it? Why not make an open source version of Spotify instead? Does that already exist?
Bandcamp was sold to Songtradr in 2023, a large music corporation. Directly after that sale, Songtradr fired half of Bandcamp’s staff.
As we’ve seen with virtually every other ‘good’ company that is sold off to a large corporation, it is virtually inevitable that it will begin to enshittifiy at some point in search of larger profits. It makes sense to promote a cooperative alternative not only as a form of prefiguration, but as preemptive self defense against eventual exploitation by the enshittifying company.
Thank you for explaining that! I love this idea of prefigurative politics, I’ve never heard a term for this before.
