I feel ya @Jordan . We’re all here, at least in part, because we share an instinct that it ought to be possible for ethical online record stores to be financially sustainable for operators, and support artists. But the digital platform industry isn’t set up to support that, so we need to work together at a larger scale. How might TSMN support what SubJam is trying to do?
One possibility we’ve talked about a lot here is cross-site discovery. Unstream and FairPlayer are both a proof of concept for this. But I look forward to the day when music fans can browse on a BandWagon or Mirlo service, for example, find an album by an artist hosted on SubJam or DistroSub, and buy it, all without leaving the service they started on. With both the artist and the music host getting a fair cut of the sale.
As a starting point, facilitating the search wouldn’t be a revenue source. Although music hosts would benefit when an artist they host is found through another service. But maybe there’s a way to build in a small finders fee for the service hosting a search that leads to a sale?
Coming back to Patreon, in another topic, I wrote;
I suspect the Patreon owners realise dedicated micropatronage platforms might be on their way out, so as others have noted, they’ve expanded into hosting the work itself, social network function, etc. Functionally, they’re going exactly the same way as SS (SubStack), and as @LLK points about above, for similar reasons (ownership and funding model). I don’t judge anyone for using it, but I wouldn’t recommend it.