Use the Machine, Don’t Marry It
All money is filthy. The question is not whether we touch it, but whether we let it rewire our process, our time, and our voice.
An AOF editorial on platforms, hypocrisy, and building art that survives extraction.
1) The honest contradiction
We can’t live off-grid. Even this sentence will probably end up on a corporate server framed by ads, nudged by an algorithm that knows more about our habits than our closest friends. Posting this on Instagram or anywhere else is hypocritical if purity is the metric. But purity is the wrong metric. Survival is.
Art in 2025 is made inside a capture system. The “open web” has been enclosure by another name. Protocols became platforms; commons became malls; discovery became adtech. We’re not looking for a fantasy escape hatch. We’re looking for a working practice: how to use platforms without becoming their product.
At AOF, we canceled our personal Spotify accounts and still maintain artist nodes. That dissonance isn’t moral failure; it’s an index of the real. Refusal where possible. Subversion where necessary. Use, don’t rely.
All money is filthy. The question is not whether we touch it, but whether we let it rewire our process, our time, and our voice.
2) Platform logic: why reliance corrodes the work
Platforms are not neutral tools; they are behavioral environments. Their incentives are architectural:
- Optimise for scale (because ads).
- Reward sameness (because of predictability).
- Punish discontinuity, ambiguity, and slowness (because these resist categorisation and can’t be priced cleanly).
When artists rely on a single platform, the artwork is slowly reshaped by these pressures. You don’t just post to a feed—you write for the feed. Cadence becomes compliance. The audience that “belongs” to you is, in fact, rented from the platform, revocable by policy change or a machine-generated suspicion of risk. We’ve lived through this repeatedly: reach cliffs, silent shadow bans, inexplicable demonetisations, and the slow drift of communities into algorithmic quiet.
The conclusion isn’t “delete everything.” It’s to treat platforms as ports or nodes, not homes.
3) “Bandcamp is different”… until it isn’t
We’re not going to valorise Bandcamp, or any single venue. History is boringly consistent: consolidation follows growth. Even “indie” platforms inherit the platform disease once their investors demand extraction. Assume every platform will be bought, pivot, or quietly die. Build accordingly.
4) What “use, don’t rely” looks like in practice
Here’s the AOF field method—a set of habits, not commandments:
- POSSE with teeth – Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
- Canonical lives on our domain(s).
- Syndication copies are excerpts or alternate edits—useful, but never the master.
- Every post carries a return path (permalink, QR, shortlink) that points home.
- Redundancy is freedom – If a node is your only node, it’s already a risk.
- Mirrored archives (local + cloud), periodic exports (media + metadata), offline zips.
- Release plans never hinge on one pipeline. If one gate closes, the work still ships.
- Formats that outlive platforms – PDF, EPUB, WAV/FLAC, plain HTML, printed zines, cassettes, vinyl one-offs, risograph posters, Instax proofs.
- If it can’t be exported, it’s not an archive; it’s a dependency.
- Revenue as a mesh, not a funnel –
- Direct sales (Shopify or self-hosted) + IRL sales (fairs, pop-ups) + limited editions.
- Price ladders: low entry (zine/PDF), mid (deluxe bundle), high (1-of-1 art object).
- Keep at least one rail that can operate when the others fail (cash in a room still works).
- RESIST Digital ID and centralisation of anything.
- Cadence belongs to the work –
- We refuse the demand for relentless posting. Some transmissions are slow on purpose.
- We design “quiet windows”—time where nothing is shipped but much is made.
- Audience as community, not traffic –
- A small list you can email directly beats “reach” you cannot.
- IRL rituals: print drops, QR hunts, micro-events, pop-up listening rooms.
- “Fans” become co-archivists when given assets that can travel without us.
- Metrics are information, not instruction –
- Analytics help us see; they don’t get to decide.
- If a graph contradicts the work’s truth, the graph loses.
- Exit strategy baked in –
- Every platform account has a documented “how we leave” plan: where the audience goes, how the catalogue stays reachable, what we shut down vs. leave as a signpost.
5) The ethics of attention (and why “Wrapped” feels wrong)
Spotify’s Wrapped is design theatre: a yearly ritual where surveillance is reframed as a gift. It flatters taste to naturalise capture. The numbers are not neutral; they instruct future behaviour (yours and the machine’s). Artists become anxious accountants of streams measured at micro-cent levels that can never pay for a studio month, let alone a life.
Our position is plain: listen how you like, but know what your listening funds. If you love an artist, buy something direct occasionally. Not because it absolves you, but because it reintroduces proportionality into a system that refuses to value labour. And yes — sometimes we will still place tracks where the audience currently lives. But we refuse the conversion of art into perpetual micro-content to please an optimisation engine.
6) Hypocrisy, reframed as literacy
Calling ourselves hypocrites ends the conversation too early. It’s not hypocrisy; it’s literacy — the ability to read a hostile environment and operate within it without surrendering authorship.
- We will occasionally post on Instagram, TikTok, or other streaming platforms.
- We will also keep our masters, press our own artefacts, and sell hand-to-hand.
- We will use the machine’s roads to redirect people to spaces it cannot own: a room, a print, a conversation, a book signed in a hallway, a cassette sold from a backpack in the rain on a European train station platform to a stranger who doesn't speak the same language.
That tension is not a flaw; it is the practice.
7) AOF’s working commitments (so we can be held to them)
- No single point of failure. Every release exists in at least three states: online canonical, offline/print, and mirrored archive.
- Direct-first economics. We will maintain our own shop and IRL sales as the primary channel; platforms are auxiliaries, not masters.
- Slow is allowed. We reserve the right to vanish from feeds while a work finds its form.
- Transparent exits. If we leave a platform, we’ll publish a clear forwarding map and keep a static signpost for those arriving late.
- Local ties matter. Cardiff or Athens isn’t “market size”; they're real places with radios, rooms, and people.
8) What we ask of you (artists, listeners, co-conspirators)
- Try one direct purchase for every dozen streams.
- If a piece moved you, archive it—save the PDF, print the zine, burn the WAVs to a disc, bring them into the real.
- Tell two people in person. Algorithms fear conversations they cannot scrape.
- If you run a venue, a café, a radio hour: adopt a local artist for a month. Pay something, however small. Turn “exposure” into patronage with boundaries.
9) Closing the loop
Facelessness at AOF isn’t absence; it’s assembly. We are not a brand to wear; we are a method to practice: build redundancies, keep masters, sell things you can hand to another human, and treat platforms as roads rather than addresses.
We’ll still post where the world scrolls, for now. But the work will always return to the table — paper, ink, a card reader that sometimes fails, a conversation that doesn’t.
All money is filthy. We move carefully through the dirt.
— AOF
FACELESS
