With the shit winds growing ever stronger and blowing their stink a little further into our lives each day, I thought I'd try and take a look at some of the music hosting services trying to build alternatives for musicians to get their art into the world, and not get completely ripped off by corporate owned music streaming services.
Several artists, from Diploid to Tom Petty have been actively removing their music from spotify, citing several reasons, but most notably CEO Daniel Ek investing almost billion dollars into a drone warfare company, before stepping down after spotify copped so much backlash. spotify has "totally redeemed" itself though, thanks to efforts to make more features available to non-paying accounts, increasing playback quality, rolling out even more new AI integration features as well as an in-app messaging service - so you don't have to leave the app to tell people about the latest playlist you had AI make you. 🙄🤮
While this specific article isn't the space to lay out a whole thesis and approach around more ethical art consumption, music streaming is absolutely not a part of that conversation. Paying tech corporations $15/month for the ease and ubiquity of being able to access most of the recorded music in the world from almost anywhere, while artists receive fractions of a cent per song listened to is only helping to enrich tech companies and ripping off artists trying to get their music out in to the world.
So for this article, I'll be focusing on music hosting platforms rather than streaming ones, and exploring more artist friendly alternatives to a platform like Bandcamp rather than just suggesting a different streaming service.
For listeners
As with most things owned and operated by big tech corporations, music streaming is made to be frictionless and sticky - easy to use and hard to leave. Millions of dollars have been spent on UI and features to make it harder to envision moving away from the platforms once you're initiated - But there's a few options for bringing your music with you without relying on streaming.
The oldheads might remember actually carrying around walkmans and discmans and cd wallets, but schlepping around physical media seems a bit of a stretch here in the not too distant future. If you don't have an apple phone, ditching music streaming can actually be super simple! Most other smart phones have expandable memory, so just load up a micro SD card with a bunch of music and you're good to go.
For folks with an apple device, I guess it's time to think about getting a dedicated music player or a new phone if you don't want to carry around any extra stuff just to listen to music.
For artists
Using a spotify royalty calculator, I punched in the plays of the most popular tracks of the most popular local DIY band from my area (that has toured numerous times internationally, has US distribution and was featured on several spotify playlists). Their top five tracks combined have just shy of 500,000 plays, so using the Australian royalty rate of 0.004c/stream that comes to $1,980. Using the global average royalty rate it drops to $1,190!
Under two grand for half a million streams feels like an absolutely fucking pathetic carrot to dangle in front of artists, and a lot local bands aren't getting that number of plays!
The initial promise of social media and music streaming seemed too good to be true for smaller and independent artists: A platform to connect directly with fans, and a way to easily distribute your music so more people than ever can find and listen to it.
Sadly, it was too good to be true. The reality of social media now is advertising and surveillance companies that prey on the social capital you've built with friends and fans and imposing 'pay to play' barriers to have your posts actually seen by those who already follow you. Music streaming platforms have become even bigger leaches than major record labels, with monthly subscription fees, opaque rules and abysmal payouts for royalties and pushing AI slop to further reduce paying royalties.
It's an absolute fucking shit show.
Please don't give yourself stockholm syndrome trying to satisfy spotify's terminal stockholder syndrome
Please don't give yourself stockholm syndrome trying to satisfy spotify's terminal stockholder syndrome
Where to host/find your music?
With Bandcamp being sold off twice in the last few years and laying off over 60% of their staff, they've become a corporate owned platform now. Their standard platform fees of 15% outside of one day a month takes a fair bite out of every sale for artists.
So in this article we'll instead be taking a look at:
Ampwall
In development since 2023 and in public beta now, Ampwall is being built by active musicians to provide an artist-first alternative to bandcamp. You can read their mission statement here.
For artists they run a membership at $10USD/year to help keep platform fees low, currently at 5%, but they say they hope to continue to lower transaction fees as more artists sign on and create memberships. For listeners, accounts are free and at checkout there is a small checkbox to choose to cover the artist's platform fees.
Ampwall members are able to sell physical merch as well as digital music, with current members already offering cassettes/vinyl, zines and clothing through their accounts.
For an example of Ampwall's embedded player we have Pure Mass from Gadigal/Dharug country, and for an example with physical merch, Convulsing from Naarm.
Mirlo
Mirlo is a music hosting platform with optional platform fees; they allow the artist to set how much of the purchase price is given as platform fees. You can read their mission statement here.
They trust artists to determine how much they're willing/capable of paying to have their music hosted. If artists do choose to pay platform fees, listeners are again given the option at checkout to pay the platform fees for them. From what I can find, Mirlo seems to only offer sales of digital media.
For an example of Mirlo's embedded player, we have Unsanitary Napkin from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa.
Subvert
Currently in alpha testing and rolling out their launch. They hope to be fully up and running soon this year, taking only a certain amount of new artists per week and making sure everything is working in hopes of helping them scale gracefully. You can read their about page here. Sales are only for digital media at present, but they do intend to roll out physical media and merch sales.
Honestly, Subvert feels like a mixture of an attempt Ampwall and Mirlo's business structures combined with the dazzling veneer of hypebeast marketing. They're very open about their budget in their docs, and quite a bit of it is going to advertising on social media to attract users.
In their first board meeting vote, they elected to collect no platform fees for launch, but have scheduled another vote on it for May if they don't find it sustainable. As with the others, listeners can still elect to pay 5-15% on top of their purchase to help support the site.
Faircamp
Unlike the other platforms, Faircamp is a self-hosted platform. If you have someone in your band who's a bit of a tech nerd, it's relatively easy to setup and operate. Faircamp also lends itself really well to podcast and radio shows, with RSS feeds available. The Faircamp software is a static site generator that accesses a folder/folder hierarchy to generate catalogue and album pages that can each be individually stylised. You can read more about Faircamp and see some examples here.
The recent Demo Fest '25 organised by Montreal collective The Counterforce was also created with Faircamp; with over 70 demos available, it's one of the largest catalogues built so far.
It is possible to link your paypal to take payments for downloads, and set a number of free plays before users are prompted for payment.
Bandwagon
Bandwagon is a bit more niche and still also being developed, but it's a fediverse compatible platform that can also be self-hosted, but the developers encourage people to use the flagship instance while its still being built.
Being fedi compatible means folks can follow you directly from your account and any updates or new music will appear in their feed. You can read more about Bandwagon here.
Wrap Up
I think for ease of setup, features and ethos Ampwall is currently the best alternative music hosting platform. The small buy-in from artists both helps to keep the platform sustainable and is just enough of a barrier to entry to make sure it won't be flooded with slop; and with their intentions being to further lower platform fees as more artists have their music hosted there, that return on investment over Bandcamp's platform fees is kind of a moot point.
Mirlo seems like a pretty sweet platform too, but the embedded player and some other UI stuff definitely still needs a bit of work, as well as only being a digital media platform and having their payments through stripe, which isn't quite as popular in australia.
BONUS ROUND:
I also was recently shown DISTROSUB, an australian developed and run micro-subscription streaming service that seems kinda cool, but streaming wasn't the focus of this article.
Also, if you want to get back to the P2P roots of a lot of early internet (and even pre-internet with mixtapes really) music and file sharing, SoulSeek has popped up for me a few times recently and seems like a sweet throwback and way to find a bunch of cool new/old music. (Just chuck a few bucks the artists way if they're still kicking).
Header Image: Rifki Kurniawan - Unsplash
Cassettes Image: Dmitrii E - Unsplash