Power to the People

You could own nothing and be happy was the claim. But maybe we do want to own the things that matter to us.

It will be unsurprising to those of you that are regular readers of these columns that I have invested to become a member of Subvert.fm, the new artist and community owned music platform.

What I thought I would offer is a little more explanation of why, and what I think it has to do with the question of who does music belong to, with the concept of community ownership that people have been gesturing toward for decades under a variety of names, and with a vision for reorganising cultural life so ambitious in its sweep that I felt obliged to spend a paragraph or two making it sound as gloriously daft as it deserves to before I explain why it is, in my honest opinion, the only practical option remaining.

If you aren’t a big fan of high concept philosophical discussions of culture, community and the structures of embedded and developing power that are conspiring to eliminate access to both, you’ll need to bear with me. This column is going to get wildly expansive before it gets practical.

There is a version of the community ownership conversation that takes place at conferences, in the kind of room where somebody will eventually say the word “commons” without any trace of self-consciousness. ‘Commons’ is a somewhat outdated term, largely vanished from everyday use, that means exactly what community ownership and land trusts mean in contemporary practice, and it carries the same implication; that some things belong, or at least ought to belong, to the people who use and depend on them rather than to whoever happens to have had the capital to buy them. The vision articulated in these rooms is vast and genuinely intoxicating, even if I often feel it’s going over my head a bit. Ultimately what everyone is driving at is this; imagine a world in which the places people love are owned by the people who love them, in which the football club, boxing gym, local park, running track, music venue, record shop, rehearsal studio, and pub at the end of the road are not private assets waiting to be optimised and eventually liquidated. Imagine if they were held in trust for the communities they serve, permanently and by design; a world in which the money that is generated by, and flows through, culture was landing somewhere recognisable, rather than accumulating at distances so remote from the actual event of a song being written and played and heard that the entire chain of value has to be subjected to a forensic autopsy to understand where it all went and why nobody can afford to make it any more.

This vision is, let’s be honest about it, the kind of thing that sounds completely magnificent after two glasses of wine and then, in the cold light of a Tuesday morning, with a rent review notice on the desk and an energy bill that has gone up 400% in four years, seems like the elaborate fantasy of people who have never actually had to run anything.

Let’s take a central question that you often hear at the heart of that conversation: “Who does this city belong to?” What a gorgeous, airy, useless question. Because the reality we are all experiencing is that the city belongs to whoever holds the title deeds and the planning permissions, and these days that means the property tycoons and the developers. The people and corporations who are currently converting the building next door into forty-seven luxury apartments with a ground-floor unit described in the marketing materials as “an exciting retail opportunity for the right operator,” by which they mean a coffee chain on a lease shorter than the average term as Prime Minister. The people who live in and actually use the city? They pay to be there, which is an entirely different relationship.

And yet.

The idea that communities should own the things that matter to them is not, in practice, as utopian as it sounds. Communities have been buying their local pubs for years, establishing them as assets of community value and running them through cooperative structures because the alternative was to watch them become another sodding Betting Shop. Or maybe a Starbucks, if you’re lucky. Football supporters have spent decades fighting for ownership stakes in clubs, partly out of a genuine level of loyalty and sentiment and partly because they had watched enough chairmen sell enough grounds to enough property developers to understand that loyalty and sentiment without a share certificate is just peripheral noise. The model of community ownership, the people who use or value a thing taking control of it, is not new. What is new, certainly within the field of music, is the scale at which it is now being applied, and the seriousness with which it is being built. Subvert is the latest example of this approach, and it is driven by a very specific example of what happens when you don’t control, or even have a say in, your environment.

In 2022, Bandcamp was purchased by Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite. A year and a half later, Epic sold it to Songtradr, a music licensing company, which laid off half the workforce, including most of the union’s bargaining team. Bandcamp had been, for many years, the closest thing independent music had to a fair deal; artists sold music and merchandise directly to their audience, the platform took a modest cut, the relationship was transparent and the money was traceable. It felt, in other words, like it belonged to the people who used it. But in reality it did not. It was a privately held asset, and when the people who held that asset decided there was a better return to be had elsewhere, there was no covenant, no lease, no community share structure, nothing whatsoever that gave its users any claim on what happened next. They were, by all practical measures, effectively tenants in a service they had come to rely on as if they were homeowners.

The writer Cory Doctorow coined a word for what happens to platforms that begin with good intentions and end with asset extraction; enshittification. This is the gradual decline of services as they prioritise value extraction over value creation for users, which he identifies as an inevitable consequence of platform capitalism. Bandcamp’s trajectory is arguably a case study of enshittification.

Subvert.fm is a new music marketplace where artists sell records and merchandise directly to audiences. It is almost a direct response to that process of enshittification, being structured as a cooperative, in which the platform is owned by the artists, labels, and supporters who use it. Its legal architecture is a dual-entity structure; a Limited Cooperative Association that wholly owns a public benefit corporation, designed specifically so that what happened to Bandcamp cannot happen to Subvert. The decision to sell it would require the consent of the people who use the thing, because the people who use the thing are the people who own it. One hundred percent of its founding ownership is reserved for its artists, their supporters, and the platform’s workers. Democratic governance and collective ownership are, in their own words, written into its very DNA. Subvert describe what they are building not as a utopian fantasy but as a concrete intervention. That distinction matters, and they are entirely correct to insist everyone understands it.

For Grassroots Music Venues, I have spent the better part of a decade making pretty much the same argument about buildings. The majority of UK grassroots music venues are tenants; their operators are brilliant and committed people who have built communities and cultural infrastructure and, in many cases, the early careers of artists who now play arenas, in rooms they do not own, on leases that can be terminated, by landlords who have no particular relationship with what happens on the stage. Music Venue Properties, and its public campaign Own Our Venues, exists because we decided, some years ago, to stop treating that structural vulnerability as a fact of life and start treating it as a solvable problem. And you can, in real life, solve that problem by raising capital through community share offers, acquiring freeholds, and placing venues into a Community Benefit Society whose purpose is to hold them permanently for cultural use, at fair rents, on long leases, for the communities that depend on them. It is, in a small but important way, an answer to the question “who does this city belong to?” In the towns where we have done this, in a legal and financial sense that actually matters, the answer for at least part of the physical music assets of that city is the local and musical community that paid for it. Which is, I am aware, precisely the kind of thing that sounds hopelessly idealistic until you look you have the deeds in front of you and realise that you’ve actually done it.

There is a phrase that circulated a few years ago, originating with the World Economic Forum, that has achieved a curious afterlife as a shorthand for comprehensive dispossession; ‘you will own nothing and be happy’. To be fair to the authors, it was not intended to be a One World Order decree that would strike fear into the hearts of the liberty-at-all-costs brigade. It was presented as a possibility forecast, a vision of a subscription-based, asset-light future in which access has replaced ownership, the friction of things has been smoothed away, and people are content to live as tenants in someone else’s space. What it described, with a precision its authors perhaps almost certainly did not intend, is the structural condition in which most musicians, most venue operators, most fans of independent music already live. They do not own the platform. They do not own the building. They do not own the distribution network, the streaming service, the rehearsal room. They access all of these things on terms set by whoever does own them, and they are notified when those terms change. Sometimes by a press release or a price increase, sometimes by a notice on the door. And we should be very clear; it has not made them happy. At all.

The alternative to this rented existence is not a utopia, it is a set of legal classifications and documents; a community benefit society; a limited cooperative association; a cultural land trust with a fair rent and a covenant that says this building is for music, permanently, regardless of what the market would prefer. And now, with Subvert, a digital platform with a membership structure and an elected board and a governance document that makes the sale of the thing contingent on the agreement of the people who use it. These are not, as you might imagine from the rarefied atmosphere of scholastic debate that gave birth to such ideas, romantic gestures. They are title deeds and articles of incorporation, the boring administrative machinery of a world in which the answer to “whose music is this?” is very simple. It is ours. We made it, we distributed it, we bought it, and now, together, we have incorporated that mechanism, here are all the registered documents, would you like to see the accounts?

In other words, this is an alternative vision of the future where you will own the things you care about, and the communities you are part of, and the places that matter to you. The mounting evidence is that this makes people considerably happier than the opportunity to pay a faceless, and all-too-often exploitative, overlord for the right to rent their property.

The conference version of this argument will continue. Someone will say “commons.” The catering will be good. I do not begrudge any of it, because the ideas are right, and ideas need rooms in which to be developed before they can be turned into documents that actually change things. But I have learned, from running a charity that campaigns for and buys music venues, and from watching what happened to Bandcamp, and from reading the founding documents of a cooperative that is building collectively owned digital infrastructure one member at a time, that the gap between the airy vision and the practical reality is not philosophical. It is administrative. Someone has to file the paperwork. Someone has to do the share offer. Someone has to build the cooperative, elect the board, register the structure, and send the message that says; this is not for sale, because it is not ours to sell.

The people who bought a share in their local venue own their local venue. The members of Subvert own their platform. The question of whose city this is has an answer, and the answer, in each of these cases, is the people who showed up and bought a share in it.

John Lennon, optimistic author of the song which provides the title for this piece, was not known for understatement. But stripped of the raised fist and the stadium delivery, the demand the phrase Power to the People articulates can actually be quite specific. There’s no need to seize the means of production, or abolish the concept of ownership. You just create the circumstances where the people who love, need or rely on a thing have the possibility to have power over it.

Power to the People 2026: Mostly paperwork.