I vote for a return of music stores where you can browse and listen before buying releases from fave artists, take it home and own the rights to play it as often as you want without further financial penalties. Better still, Artist-owned and operated community music stores where all profits go back to the creators. #music #cooperatives

Good news that more or less exists online; it's called Bandcamp. Yeah it's owned by some corporate fucks who are going to kill it any day, but you might as well enjoy it while it lasts, and support those artists directly with your money.

Bandcamp will eventually be broken by greedyguts capitalists. What is needed is an artist community led cooperative streaming platform. IMHO

I agree completely and said so in my response. But that's no reason not to support the thousands and thousands of artists on the site right now, offering exactly what you're asking for.

And let's be real: Yeah, Bandcamp is almost certainly going to be gutted by it's corporate fuck owners any day now, AND they already did some high fuckery by firing half its union workers when those new owners showed up, BUT right now it's actually a good deal for both fans and artists.

you can give your money directly to the band/artist with less than 20% of what you pay out going to the various middle men (for indie artists; labels probably get a cut too but even label signed artists still get more money per fan dollar spent than anywhere else) and artists can be on the site with minimal investment. They can sell whatever merch they want, for whatever price they see fit.

That's literally as good as it has EVER been for artists.