No Platform Landlords

Imagine spending years in an apartment, making it your home. You pay rent on time, maintain the space beautifully, and build a community with your neighbors. Then one day, without warning or input from tenants, the building is sold to a new owner; a corporate holding company who begins raising the rent and changing the rules.

For hundreds of thousands of musicians on Bandcamp, this is a familiar feeling. In March 2022, Bandcamp was suddenly sold to Epic Games, then sold again to Songtradr just 18 months later. Each sale came with layoffs, policy changes, and growing uncertainty for the hundreds of thousands of artists who had come to rely on the platform.

Owning Our Digital Spaces

The parallel between physical and digital housing isn't just a metaphor. It's structural. When you don't own your home, you're renting from a landlord. Similarly, when you don't own your platform, you're renting your digital space from a platform landlord. The dynamics of power and precarity are similar in both cases.

Consider what home ownership provides:

• Control over your space and its future
• The ability to build equity over time
• Protection from arbitrary eviction or rule changes
• The power to make decisions about your environment
• The opportunity to pass something valuable to future generations

Now consider what platform ownership could provide:

• Control over the platform's future and policies
• The ability to capture the value you create
• Protection from sudden platform changes or shutdowns
• Democratic say in platform governance
• The ability to build lasting digital infrastructure

Beyond Digital Landlords

Some might argue that we just need better platform landlords—more empathetic ones who understand artists' needs. This was the promise of Bandcamp's founder, Ethan Diamond, an avid music lover and musician himself. But focusing on finding better landlords misses the point entirely. The problem isn't the character virtue of individual landlords; it's the structure of landlordism itself.

Just as the solution to housing precarity isn't finding kinder landlords, the solution to platform precarity isn't finding more “artist-friendly” CEOs. The solution is collective ownership. When artists own their platform, they don't need to rely on the benevolence of founders—they have direct control through democratic governance.

The Path Forward

This isn't about condemning individual platform owners. Many, like Diamond, likely have good intentions. But good intentions don't change power structures. No matter how well-intentioned a landlord might be, the fundamental power imbalance remains: they own, you rent.

As we look beyond Bandcamp, and the emerging alternative options, we face a choice: Do we want to find another platform landlord, hoping this time will be different? Or do we want to finally own our digital home?

The answer is clear. We need collective ownership. We don’t need new landlords.

Sincerely Ours,