Ampwall is building a better platform for independent music.

It's a tough time to be a musical artist. It's never been easier to record music and deliver it to people; it's also never been harder to cut through the noise and feel like what you're doing matters. Each new technology puts fresh paint on an old machine: major labels grease the right wheels and now Spotify works for them; tech giants control access to communities and create toxic spaces for artists and their supporters; AI offers a dystopian future where creativity is reduced to "content" and we wonder how much of our audience is actually flesh and blood. Even Bandcamp has gone from indie champion to Epic Games' vassal and now is a subsidiary of a music licensing company. We're told to pump out new songs, engage with fans on TikTok, master social media, and do more work for a larger audience that couldn't care less.

Adding to the frustration, the size of these monsters – Spotify, Apple, Google, Bandcamp, Tidal, TikTok – lets them control the narrative and claim that everything is going great for musicians. Look at the numbers! Spotify does pay out… to the 1% of the 1% who win the game. TikTok does make people overnight stars… if they are the right kind of "content creator" with the right visuals. Bandcamp offers direct sales… for a 15% tax (plus payment processing) on an outdated platform that limps along after laying off 60% of its staff.

Most artists find this reality alienating, isolating, and demoralizing. They're shouting for relevance in a noisy room, their successes live only as long as the algorithm blesses them, and nothing feels like it's built for them. Financial success is not a given but the need for dignity and connection with people who get it is universal. This is the world of independent music. It is massive, misunderstood, and ready for something better.

To do that, we took a hard look at the way other platforms operate and came to a radical conclusion: any platform whose primary source of of revenue comes from collecting fees on sales will always prioritize sales and high-sellers over everyone else. The implications of that are huge! No matter what the platform's intentions are, at some point it will be forced to find ways to squeeze more money out of its high-sellers to subsidize everything else. That platform will look at everything through one lens: "Does this bring us more sales?"

This traditional e-commerce marketplace approach can be good if you are one of the high-sellers and if sales is your top priority. But what if it's not? What if you're not even the artist selling stuff and instead you're a lifelong supporter of independent music scenes? What if you're the person making the cover artwork, or writing reviews and interviews, or telling everyone you know to go to the shows? Do you have a place in this e-commerce marketplace world? Again and again, we kept asking ourselves these questions and coming back to the same place: the e-commerce marketplace exists for the market first, art and artists second.

Enshittification, the gradual degredation of an online product's quality, is something we've all seen happening to platforms we love. In our opinion, a key element of this is the "grow-at-all-costs" mentality that pervades tech startups. This so often comes back to the role of investors in a company. Venture Capital floods companies, encouraging them to dominate the market no matter the cost, and only later do they figure out how to become a sustainable business. In the process, they might do things like sell out to a larger company in order to be a pawn in the larger company's legal battles or lay off the majority of the staff.

As a public benefit company, we have an obligation to consider the long-term impact of our work on society. We believe that our ability to make independent decisions without outside influence is crucial to satisfying this obligation. That independence requires us to avoid becoming overly dependent on outside investors. And minimizing (or avoiding entirely) the need for outside investment means we need reliable sources of revenue.

We want Ampwall to be available to as many people as possible. We also want to make sure we don't go bankrupt before we can reach a critical mass. We also want to avoid the e-commerce trap where we're forced to cater exclusively to a small group of high-sellers while neglecting the joy of our communities. To satisfy as many needs as possible, we landed on a simple, classic solution: a low yearly subscription for anyone uploading music.

Artist subscriptions are inspired by a utility pricing, aka "pay for what you use,". It's cheap, as little as $10/year. As we build more features, we'll introduce different tiers for artists with different needs, and we have plans for features and tools that go so far beyond what you're used to seeing on something like Bandcamp.

Ampwall still has transaction fees: 5% plus our payment processor PayPal. We do this to supplement our revenue while we grow the subscription business. It lets us keep subscriptions as low as possible and helps us cover costs associated with sudden spikes in traffic. Over time, our goal is to continue reducing transaction fees for artists who share our dislike for them.

The people responsible for Ampwall are active musicians, still writing and releasing and touring. We started this out of pure love as a nights-and-weekend project. We were our own first users and we're still funding it out of pockets. A core group of us work on Ampwall full-time while we get it off the ground. In 18 months, we went from nothing to a thriving web platform and a growing community. We've already gone past Bandcamp in many platform features and we are just getting started.

I hope you'll join us on our mission. Public signup began in September 2024 and you can sign up now or join our mailing list for news.

-Chris Grigg, founder
[email protected]