The way tech has grown in the past 25 years has forced this type of decision on all of us: enjoy the modern convenience of internet-connected tools at the cost of sacrificing opportunities and values, no matter how small, or go without.
In many cases, we've lived through the change and just got comfortable with what was happening. As big tech consolidated, it drowned everyone out, and now fewer and fewer places aren't owned by a staggeringly wealthy group of cloud lords. So we keep using Gmail. We share events and art on Mark Zuckerberg’s platforms. We keep using music technology services that actively make artists' lives worse. Lots of folks saying, "That's the way it is," but I say, “fuck that.” We should be able to get the opportunities and convenience of the internet age without giving up our agency, without falling prey to data capture and ad-tech spyware engineered by capitalism's greediest minds.
We should be able to interact online and meaningfully improve our lives and agency without being scraped for data in billionaires' private code gardens.
In the past 18 months, we've seen a bunch of services and platforms worsen in ways that create even more labor for the very artists they say they serve. They either take agency from artists, or force them to make a judgment call about their own values in exchange for access and convenience.
It's hard to imagine independent artists feeling good about continuing to give these companies money, but having the agency to leave and still have access to the features and opportunities they provide feels hard or even impossible.
We want to be the company you feel just fine about engaging with, and the company that continues to give more agency back to artists.
We believe you should be able to use tools made by people who think what you're doing is as important as you do.
Today, it's about control over your work and data, and having a choice about the tools you use to store it, share it, and listen to it.
I don't know where this will lead us. More agency to me means making your work easier to make, easier to review, easier to control, easier to share, easier to sell- while maintaining the core function of providing a natural state of listening on any device. But above all, anything that gives artists more power over their own destinies is in the mix.
