Nothing broke.
That was the positive report from the offices at Subvert.fm in June, marking one month into the new platform’s public debut. The first real challenger to Bandcamp, which had been laboriously user-tested since its announcement nearly two years ago, Subvert reported handling more than 80,000 visitors on launch day, and signing up more than 5,000 new members/artists/labels to its co-op model.
“There are now over 150,000 tracks on Subvert,” the site reports in a monthly update, “and roughly 30,000 releases. As of June, there were more than 100 new artist members uploading music on Subvert each day.
As Subvert’s staff stress-tested their servers, another platform was pulling the plug.
It probably took less than five seconds for one of the most comprehensive archives of electronic music to be destroyed.
Juno Download abruptly announced its closure on June 1, wiping out the entire website and replacing it with a vague, 86 word farewell. It probably took less than five seconds for one of the most comprehensive archives of electronic music to be destroyed.
Juno Download had been launched as part of and then split off and sold off by Juno Records. The vinyl storefront has been at pains to explain they are still in business, as Juno Download had simultaneously nuked every active social media account they had. Bewildered users were thumping on the vinyl seller’s front door demanding answers.
The most peculiar and fundamental question behind the abrupt closure of Juno Download didn’t have anything to do with the fate of everyone’s shopping cart or saved playlists. It was why Juno Download existed at all. When they began to offer downloads alongside vinyl releases in the mid-’00s — just a few years after the launch of iTunes — Juno had already discovered a key fragment of the formula that would enable Bandcamp to achieve liftoff. They sold vinyl, and on the same page you could scroll down a little and buy the same record as an mp3. Inexplicably, Juno seemed to believe that selling the same record in two different formats was confusing rather than a huge advantage.
It wasn’t just Juno — every early ’00s platform decided that music buyers were just really thick and couldn’t comprehend buying an mp3 but also wanting to maybe buy vinyl or a t-shirt at the same place or even at the same time. Juno had that, or something like it, and threw it away, hiving off and then selling off the “Download” component to a crew in North Carolina that no one in the industry ever heard of.
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The second part of the Bandcamp formula, though, would have required the storefront owner stepping back and letting the artist or label arrange their own products on a shelf, selling whatever they wanted. It is hard to imagine Juno or any record shop figuring this part out on their own — it’s antithetical to the retail experience — but it’s that aspect that Subvert.fm is taking to an extreme.
Subvert is not a company with shares and private lenders looking to 10x their investment. Subvert describes itself as a “cooperative-owned music marketplace” in which the platform is owned by the artists, labels and other people who use it. While a staff is in place, what they do all day is directed by the platform’s user-owners through a complex but transparent governance scheme.
Shaking down labels for front page placement has become the real growth engine for music platforms from Beatport to SoundCloud to Spotify, a process of persistent nickel-ing and dime-ing that slowly seduced the music industry into a 21st century form of payola.
“Transparent” is a keyword here. I’ve been writing about platforms for more than a decade; the closest we ever got to seeing financials was when Beatport was rolled up by Robert Sillerman as part of his wobbly EDM conglomerate SFX and had to publish big, non-itemized numbers in the company’s 10-K reports for investors. On Subvert, everything is open. 5 Mag was among the 20,000 who joined the platform (though like many others we seem to be mostly looking around). It’s what you don’t see that’s most notable, though: on Subvert are no inducements to “upgrade,” to subscribe for a few more bucks to unlock a few more features. Shaking down labels for front page placement has become the real growth engine for music platforms from Beatport to SoundCloud to Spotify, a process of persistent nickel-ing and dime-ing that slowly seduced the music industry into a 21st century form of payola. There’s no pay-to-play on Subvert other than what the terms say upfront, which won’t change without you having at least some say in how they change. That’s different, not just in the music industry but on the internet as a whole.
In a statement sent to RA, Juno Download’s last COO attributed their demise to streaming and “‘direct to fan’ services like Bandcamp.” With these on the rise, the importance of “music webstores” like Juno Download are diminishing, he said.
There’s little question that selling mp3s and wav files is a low-margin and likely declining business. But building tools to let artists and labels sell whatever they want to whoever they want — including vinyl and wav files — doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
Subvert for its part says it is merely at the start of what they describe as a “long-term project” — to become no less than the “Mondragón of Music.” That’s a reference to Mondragón Corporation, the largest known cooperative entity in the world, employee-owned and operating in multiple sectors and employing close to a hundred thousand people. It’s a crazy ambition. But so far, nothing broke.
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