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Subvert's 50 Year Roadmap: The Mondragon of Music

— Subvert

Here’s a crazy thought experiment.What’s possible when the Subvert co-op has hundreds of thousands of members?

What becomes possible when a global independent music community is organized within a self-governing legal entity? 

To answer these questions, we looked back nearly 70 years to a cooperative called Mondragon. Founded in 1956 in the Basque region of Spain, Mondragon began as a small worker-owned cooperative manufacturing home appliances. Today, it's the world's largest worker cooperative, employing over 80,000 people across various industries.

Today, the Mondragon Corporation includes a range of community-owned enterprises:

  • A bank
  • A chain of grocery stores
  • A university
  • A construction company

What can Subvert learn from Mondragon? Imagine a future where the Subvert Platform is just the start of our long journey. Our underlying legal and organizational model is designed to allow for Subvert to become the Mondragon of Music. Picture Subvert co-op members collectively owning:

  • A vinyl pressing plant
  • A network of cooperatively-owned music venues
  • A credit union
  • Professional services
  • A housing cooperative

How This Could Work

Subvert's model serves as a kind of legal and organizational protocol, allowing new ventures to plug into our larger network. Each new service can have built-in mechanisms for raising investment and sharing ownership back with co-op members. This creates an unfair advantage:

  1. A built-in network of customers
  2. An aligned community with proven incentive structures
  3. Ways to distribute ownership of new businesses to participating co-op members
  4. Shared resources and economies of scale

As needs arise within our community, we can develop new cooperatively-owned services to meet them. Each new venture can strengthen the overall ecosystem, creating a more resilient and equitable music industry.

This isn't speculative fiction. This model already exists today with Mondragon, and there's no reason why it can't be applied to reshape the music industry. By organizing our community within a cooperative legal structure, we're laying the groundwork for these possibilities to become reality.

This isn't just about creating a better Bandcamp. It's about creating a new economy owned and controlled by us. Mondragon shows us that this is possible.

Sincerely Ours,