I made another thing 🤪

I call it Auxpack: patron subscription packs, for groups of independent artists.

Instead of (or addition to) having your own #patreon, , #bandcamp or whatever subscription offering, band together with artists in your community to form packs that fans can subscribe to. They pay once (meaning one processing fee), and the rest is divvied up amongst the artists in the group.

In closed beta. Check it out at https://auxpack.club

#music #indiemusic #fairtrademusic

Why did I build this? Because I can. But also hear me out:

Lots of creators have Patreons, a Ko-fi membership, or something. But often those come with stakes, since processing fees make it impossible to offer a really low membership price. So you end up charging $5-10/month as a single artist, effectively requiring you to offer more than you might be able to produce. Hard for artists, subscription fatigue for fans.

But some patrons do want to support artists. We should make it easier.

I explored this with my $1-a-month ramble a few weeks ago, in which I made the case for a simple way for people who like what I do to essentially give a recurring tip. But the thing that lots of artists get hung up on is (again) the platform fees.

Auxpack aims to bypass that problem by making it easy for artists to band together and form their own subscription. Think of it like a booster pack, where each trading card is an artist you already or might like.

Artists can offer some kind of bonus content to pack subscribers, the patron pays once monthly (ie one Stripe fee), and Auxpack divvies the rest among the artists via a weekly payout. Artists can optionally put aside a small % of their choosing to support the platform.

The important parts here are community and simplicity: I didn’t build this to be another streaming platform or major toolset. Instead,

It’s basically a recurring payment system you can easily plug into your existing site, as another way for people to support you & the artists in your community. Ideally these artist “packs” can support each other more sustainably than everyone having to do this on their own.

This is a really early experiment, so I’m sharing it now to gauge interest and try it out with a few fellow artists, then see where it goes.