Firuza Huseynova is an interdisciplinary researcher, iPod baby, and radio DJ based in Montréal. She has spent the better part of the past year researching alternative futures for music streaming platforms (as part of her M.A. in Digital Humanities at McGill University). We all know the perils of music streaming platforms ~ lock-in syndrome, filter bubbles, exploitation of musicians, endemic AI slop. But what is happening beyond the doom and gloom? In the conversation below, we discuss the fascinating case of Subvert, and speculate how platform co-operativism could be a joyful antidote to enshittification. Almost simultaneous to this interview, the INC published a longform by Firuza Huseynova here on the rise and fall of the music platform Nina Protocol.
Sepp Eckenhaussen: What is Subvert? And why is it interesting to you?
Firuza Huseynova: Subvert is a cooperatively-owned music streaming platform. It is a compelling supplement (and potential alternative) to corporate-owned music streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and sadly, Bandcamp.
The platform allows independent artists to sell music directly to fans with 0% platform fees. Rather than relying on revenue from ads and subscriptions, Subvert charges a one-time fee for lifetime membership in the cooperative. Each member gets exactly one vote in board elections, bylaw changes, and major decisions. It’s like a representative democracy, or market socialism for music, depending on how you lean ideologically.
As music has moved away from being embedded in material artefacts that we own (CDs, vinyls, cassettes) and towards being consumed in commodified files that we rent from distant servers (music streaming platforms), our relationship with music culture and music-making has changed. Subvert attempts to answer the question, “what would it mean for musicians not only to supply content, but to design and govern the infrastructures of streaming themselves?”
I’m a DJ, and many of my friends are musicians who really care about the flourishing of music culture, so this is an interesting question for me. It seems like everyone knows why Spotify is so awful, both for the artists who get paid pro-rated micropennies per stream, and for the listeners who are bombarded with tacky AI features and cluttered interfaces. But nobody wants to leave behind their carefully-curated music collections. Until now… (?)
Meme courtesy of Max Alper @peretsky (altered by Firuza)
SE: Subvert launched a few months ago and already has over 20,000 members, including workers, musicians, consumers, and supporters. How do you explain this success?
FH: I think they did a good job of building momentum before launching. Months in advance, over 1,000 record labels and 7,000 artists signed up, and articles hailing Subvert as the collectively-owned Bandcamp successor were written up in Resident Advisor, The Fader, and The Guardian. Artists and labels can sign up for free, while non-artist supporters have to pay $100 to become a member. Artist-members double as users who can spread the gospel of co-ownership through word-of-mouth and digital promo. I suspect the steep $100 entry fee for non-artist members may, counterintuitively, be a way of raising the stakes of membership, supplying alienated listeners with the scarcest resources of them all, a real feeling of Belonging in a Community.
Community-building ~ “an affable term but one which has always been a euphemism for network effect,” as Marek Poliks & Roberto Alonso Trillo muse in Exocapitalism. The highest hurdle for any new platform entrant to overcome is the network effect: the utility that users experience on larger platforms that prevents them from leaving for smaller alternatives. Network effects are inherent to platform physics. The more users on a platform, the more valuable the platform becomes. Without any users, a platform is, literally, useless. So it’s useful that Subvert already had thousands of users before they officially launched.
Also, upon signing up, each member receives a real physical zine in the real physical mail, along with a membership certificate and a unique membership number. A thing you can hold, imagine that! The 134-page zine (artfully designed, though unfortunately augmented with generative AI writing) details Subvert’s business plan and doubles as an initiation document.
Design for Subvert’s Zine, by @props.supply
SE: Do you expect that musicians will make a better living on a platform that they co-own? And what do you make of Subvert’s ambition to fundamentally transform the economic system of the music industry?
FH: Co-ops have an established history of success, and collective management is an ancient idea. Subvert calls itself the ‘Mondragon of Music,’ nodding to the world’s largest worker cooperative founded in 1956 in the Basque region of Spain. I am currently writing from Konvent Zero, a cooperatively-run former nunnery in rural Spain which hosts free residencies for artists & researchers. Cooperative governance is not a new idea ~ what’s new is applying the structure to the traditionally opaque music industry.
Money is merely a flow of energy. For independent musicians, direct sales (direct energy flows) do result in higher payouts than streaming. One independent songwriter calculated that it would take 47,680 Spotify streams (indirect energy flows) to equal profit from the direct sale of one album. But, given its larger user pool, Spotify can expose independent musicians to a wider audience, which may eventually lead to more direct sales. This tradeoff between exposure and fair compensation is difficult. But co-ownership can ensure that working musicians, rather than C-suite executives, control the flow of money.
Subvert’s rules and decisions are determined from the bottom-up, by members themselves. This can be helpful (for example when collectively deciding to oppose higher platform fees or refuse corporate investment), but can also be a hinderance (as Keith Rankin puts it, “in these social democratic setups, there’s tons of squabbling and it’s hard to get on the same page”). It’s much easier to “move fast and break things” when you don’t need the approval of 1000 people. While it may be ideal, collective decision-making is also messy.
Recently, Subvert’s founder Austin Robey asked the member forum: “What else should Subvert own?,” pointing to other streaming services Cantilever and Qobuz (as well as credit unions and healthcare cooperatives) as potential companies that Subvert can purchase a tiny slice of, projecting all the way up to 2075. The purpose of this would be to strengthen partnerships with like-minded companies. He received some pushback from members, who thought Subvert should focus on strengthening its existing services and becoming the best platform it can be, before co-owning other companies.
Screenshot from Subvert’s Zine: Plan for the Artist-Owned Internet
But it’s an interesting idea. The ambition to radically transform the economic system of the music industry through collective ownership is commendable. People have labelled me naïve for being idealistic my whole life, so I would never call someone naïve for having big ambitions, but it seems to me like Subvert’s ambitions are scaraly conflicting. In our interview, Austin said his “dream” is for an artist to put a Subvert link above BandCamp in their Linktree. A humble goal. But, later on, he said he “just wants [Subvert] to scale… not just to be a marginal alternative, but to enact a bigger cultural impact… to achieve responsible growth.” It remains a mystery what a ‘responsible’ level of growth is.
Scale is ultimately a way of thinking about magnitude and change. For most startups, proving scalar potential in a necessary precondition to receive funding, in order to eventually sell their company and “exit” with fat pockets. But for a platform co-op, which possesses no desire to “exit,” scale should be rethought.
Despite popular sentiment, a platform does not have to be hyperscalar to be successful. As the greatest example, take creative research platform Are.na, which is independently funded by user subscription revenue, has no ads, does not rely on corporate or VC money, and recently celebrated its 15th birthday. Charles Broskowski, a co-founder of Are.na, says the platform is a lifelong project. In an interview, he states “the ideal goal is not becoming the next Facebook”, but the next Keiunkan, a hot spring in Japan that has been operating since 705 AD.
Austin told me that he ships out Subvert zines and customized membership certificates by hand to each new member, but that this practice gets difficult as more people sign up. Human-level practices are difficult to scale, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t grow! Broskowski’s assessment of Subvert is featured on their homepage: “Ownership is the fundamental tension in platforms and marketplaces. It’s exciting to see Subvert address this head-on with a thoughtfully designed structure.” Thoughtfulness takes time. Trust is earned slowly over the long-arc, not expedited quarter-to-quarter.
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As of yet, Subvert cannot directly compete with Spotify since their catalog is a fraction of Spotify’s size, and their interface does not support playlisting for individual tracks. You won’t find all the music you usually listen to on Spotify, but you may discover some new music you otherwise never would have listened to, and make an artist’s day by buying their art directly. Fundamental transformation and subversion doesn’t need to come quickly, but emerges through the gradual accumulation of positive interactions like these. At the end of the day (week? quarter? year? decade? life? century?), the only useful alternative is one that people will actually use.
SE: How do you see enshittification happening on for-profit music platforms like Spotify and Bandcamp? And is this process happening visibly differently, maybe less, on a cooperatively owned platform like Subvert?
FH: For over a decade, I was a die-hard Spotify user. I posted my Spotify Wrapped every year like clockwork. In early 2025, after reading Liz Pelly’s excellent book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist, I began noticing more interface space devoted to sponsored content and rising subscription costs without any subsequent improvement in user experience. One day, I woke up and saw this ad square on my Spotify home page:
Screenshot of Spotify posted on Firuza’s Instagram story (Is there a cooperatively-owned Meta alternative?)
It shocked me enough to delete the app and buy a refurbished iPod..
Brad Troemel calls out Spotify by name as chief enshittifier in the ZIRPSLOP REPORT: “The pattern is always the same: extract more, offer less – even if it means killing the host. The only thing consuming these companies’ greed is whether these consumers have viable alternatives. That’s why monopoly was always the endgame – once a monopoly dominates the market, its users are stuck. Spotify can recommend you real music or shovel you AI sludge it doesn’t have to pay royalties for… our entire cultural life has been enshittified.”
Spotify can get away with enshittifying for three main reasons: 1) high switching costs such as poor library-transfer interoperability, 2) network effects keeping people “locked-in” to the platform their friends and family use, 3) a lack of usable alternatives to turn to. As well-meaning as we consumers may be, we tend to be allergic to inconvenience. I can’t even convince my own cousin to switch away from Spotify because she doesn’t want to manually move her playlists (though this can be done semi-easily using services like Playlistor). My only hope is that as the platform continues to degrade in a Heideggerian fashion, we become acutely aware of how broken Spotify really is.
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Despite being bought by Fortnite’s father Epic Games in 2022 and subsequently sold to Songtradr in 2023 (who gutted 49% of their staff, including the entire full-time editorial team), Bandcamp’s interface and user experience have remained largely the same; but it may only be a matter of time before it is their turn to enshittify. As of June 2026, Bandcamp seems to have laid off most of its remaining engineers.
Reddit thread discussing Bandcamp’s recent layoffs
By definition, cooperatively-owned platforms cannot really enshittify. As per coiner Cory Doctorow, enshittification happens as platforms shift their priorities from user experience to business customers to corporate shareholders. If Subvert never sells out to corporate interests, it can continue prioritizing the interests of users and members, not necessarily the bottom line of business operations.
SE: Sometimes it’s helpful to understand the people behind enterprises like Subvert. Subvert’s founder, Austin Robey, for instance, is a bit of a serial social entrepreneur. He previously cofounded Ampled, a co-op alternative to Patreon, as well as Metalabel. You have interviewed him for your research. What did he say, or not say, that struck you most during that conversation?
FH: Austin strikes me as a genuine guy. I think he really believes in the core promise of Subvert, more-so than other founders might believe in their product. He’s pretty open about his previous entrepreneurial experiences and attempts to learn from past failures, for example through a Post-Mortem on Ampled delivered at the Platform Cooperativism Consortium. In our interview he mentioned learning about the “importance of emotional resonance and deep strategic thinking,” which has allowed him to better communicate the immediate value of co-ownership to potential members. There’s a quote I like from Derek Wall’s Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals: “alternatives are not self-evident, they need much consideration and careful design.” Being a serial entrepreneur can be beneficial if one integrates design lessons from the past into future ventures, like skeuomorphs.
During our conversation, Austin spoke about turning down $200,000 in funding from an investor who initially seemed aligned with Subvert’s mission, but ended up pushing for changes that the collective was not comfortable with. “Integrity is expensive. Selling out costs more.” But it may be worth noting that 85% of Subvert $700,000 funding comes from Garry Elevator, a Venture Capital firm offering “early stage capital for community-led finance”.
There’s an old adage that “business ethics” is an oxymoron. Running a company will necessarily come with its own set of normative negotiations. Subvert faces an unsolved, evergreen challenge in the platform co-op movement ~ how to ensure the community stays in control while paying workers a living amount.
I think you put it succinctly in your book, Sepp ~ the cooperative turn offers a compelling response only “if we can prevent it from becoming a vehicle for further privatisation or social fragmentation.” Subvert’s success as a cooperatively-owned, non-capitalist platform depends on how well its members can collectively organize, and how effectively the organization can shield itself from being subsumed by the all-powerful, all-knowing allure of capital. I’m very hopeful, but I tend to lean optimistic.
SE: I want to end on a broader, more systemic question. Apart from your work on Subvert, you have studied how music streaming platforms operate in general and closely examined Nina Protocol, a platform that tried (and failed) to make the music streaming industry fairer using blockchain protocols. I’m curious how all this research changed your view on platform infrastructures. Do you believe we can create platforms that benefit the people who make or listen to music – for instance by co-operatively owning the infrastructure or automatically redistributing revenue using a web3 protocol? Or should we try to think outside of platforms altogether? In the latter case, what kind of innovation do we actually need to make the music industry more economically just?
FH: Truthfully, the cosmic entities of web3 and “crypto for good” just don’t interest me very much, which is a shame because I think the underlying principles behind blockchain (decentralization, peer-to-peer exchange, consensus mechanisms) are valuable. Nina Protocol tried to use blockchain protocols to make streaming fairer, but only generated around $50,000 in total revenue for artists over the course of 5 years. Crypto’s co-option by right-wing interests also leaves a really corrosive taste in my mouth.
Screenshot from Subvert’s FAQ’s
To your question about economically just innovation in the music industry, I don’t think we need to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Humans have been forming economically just configurations long before the blockchain. Fair pay, trust, and demetricization, are three main themes that emerged from my research asking artists to imagine a better music streaming landscape ~ all of these principles can be applied to co-operative structures and solidarity economies that do not rely on the blockchain for their subsistence.
Recently, I’ve fallen down a cybernetics rabbit hole which has caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about “innovation” ~ the implementation of new ideas that result in improvements to humanity. It’s a funny concept. One of Wendell Berry’s standards for technological innovation is that whatever innovates should not replace or disrupt anything good that already exists (including community relationships). But when we think about what is sold as “innovation” today, in consumer AI products and wearable surveillance technology, can we pinpoint any empirical improvements to human relationships? Technological innovation under capitalism has a tendency to diminish the power of labour, and to strengthen existing power structures instead of restructuring them at their root. Innovation that glorifies exponential growth, reductive quantification, linear progress, endless profit-making, and intrinsic acceleration is not relevant to humanity’s genuine progress, in my opinion.
I do not wish to fetishize folk politics and its cousins (nostalgia fetishism, romantic Luddism, structureless organization, anarcho-primitivism), but we absolutely should not expect technological innovation to conjure up social progress. Spotify has no incentive to provide a better product that benefits music culture; their only obligation is the fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders. Their goal to profitmaxx is actually very simple, which makes their operations highly scalable.
But justice is neither simple nor easily scalable. We should all build up our tolerance for relational inconvenience, and exercise our muscle for digital inefficiency before it completely atrophies. In the wise words of Liz Pelly, “collectives and cooperatives work to [create] the conditions for people to be in more direct collaboration with one another. It is hard work – the polar opposite of the frictionlessness that platform-optimized tech culture imposes. But friction is part of how real connections, and ultimately change, happen.”
SE: Where can people read more about your research? And where should they listen to music while reading your texts?
FH: I’m not a very productive writer. If people are interested in my ideas they should follow me on Are.na (and if you’re interested in Are.na, you can read this article I wrote about Are.na for CURSOR Mag). I’m working on publishing my master’s thesis Reorienting the Stream: Alternative Futures for Music Streaming Platforms through McGill University. Until then, you can find my musings on my website: firuza.neocities.org (it is perpetually under construction, as we all are).
If you’re curious about music streaming alternatives, I suggest signing up for a Subvert membership, and perusing through the panel of other platforms: Qobuz, Cantilever, Coda. If you want to hear my ideas in sonic form you can follow me on SoundCloud (Nina Protocol’s new benevolent uncle). Listen to your local community radio station. Whatever you do, do not listen to music on Spotify while reading my texts. Instead, listen to this improvisational performance found on Subvert, recorded live at Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation.