ISSUE 24: ANNIVERSARY
On the occasion of our fifth anniversary, New Feeling features editor Tom Beedham considers the historical circumstances that produced the co-op and our place in the growing cooperatively organized labour landscape
“A lot of what musicians are contending with [in the streaming era] is the same thing that working people everywhere are contending with,” Liz Pelly observed. Speaking with New Feeling’s public editor Tabassum Siddiqui for an audience of co-op writers and community stakeholders at the top of our annual general meeting this year, she was preaching to the choir.
Reporting at length on the alienation that the late capitalist media culture of music streaming has imposed on musicians and listeners’ relationships to the art they produce, as a freelance journalist and the author of 2025’s Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist, Pelly’s work has been a frequent source of inspiration to our own reporting and editorial vision. After she named New Feeling in the final chapter of her book, she was a natural pick when we started throwing around ideas for guests we could invite.
It’s our fifth year as a cooperative, and as with most occasions you can attach a nice round number to, we’ve been thinking through this anniversary with some extra contemplation, and this issue is an effort of nostalgic reassessment and forward-looking survey, taking stock of collective achievements and refocusing our sights.
Five years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, the advertising money publications rely on dried up, editors started killing assignments, staff were let go, and publications closed shop entirely. New Feeling was born as a response to that crisis, which has only been further complicated by the normalization of technologies like large language models and capital’s continued investment in platforms like Substack. Michael Rancic explores the specific implications of that platform at length in this issue, scrutinizing how Substack’s spurious scheme to sell writers and workers the promise of empowerment effectively sequesters them from their colleagues, a shared working environment, and formal safeguards against their own exploitation.
Things can be pretty grim, but we’re continuously reminded of the company we keep.
Cooperatives are on the rise. In sync with interconnected factors like historic labour organizing, renewed interest in mutual aid, and compounding disaffection with the failures of extractive business models, workers across industries are rediscovering the potential of collective response. You don’t have to look far to reckon with the shared struggles plaguing the contemporary labour landscape, but if you look a little further, there are new horizons to glimpse, too.
“The process is the project” : Egyptian Cotton Arkestra stays rooted in Time and Place
Graham Latham
Part of this year’s anniversary celebrations included a salon and social event at Toronto’s It’s Ok* Studios, where we partnered with “collectively owned Bandcamp successor” Subvert for the international public debut of their platform. A direct response to Bandcamp’s back-to-back acquisitions by Epic Games in 2022 and Songtradr in 2023, Subvert’s business has been protectively designed as a cooperatively owned and democratically controlled alternative to the inevitable enshittification of corporate asset management. At the time of publication, it has nearly 12,000 members around the world.
Subvert is just one of the many co-ops covered in this issue’s exploration of “21st Century Co-op Ecologies,” where we survey the flourishing cooperative movement that has taken shape over the last five years and trace its deeper historical foundations. In music labour and across industries, over the past five years, co-operatives have developed a rich new landscape of networked resource sharing and interdependent infrastructure – proof that workers aren’t restricted to isolated toil; we can thrive together.
So as we celebrate five years, we’re recommitting to the principles that brought us into being: transparency, collaboration, care, and a belief that labour can be organized differently. This is an evolving collective practise shaped through conversation, disagreement, experiment, and shared labour.
We’re also looking ahead, so alongside the features mentioned above, in this issue, you’ll find profiles of emerging acts working towards better futures. Graham Latham writes about Montreal’s Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, and co-op members Daniel G. Wilson, Michael Rancic, and I interview Sentries, Little Stone Crow, and Emma Goldman. Meanwhile, Leslie Ken Chu facilitates a conversation between and Sook-Yin Lee and Gong Gong Gong 工工工 about their shared Chinese and Canadian roots, and how their work transcends borders.
If you like what we do, consider joining us. If you’re already a member, tell a friend! We’re currently running a discount on member fees for our annual member drive. If you join the co-op between now and December 31, you can pay just $5 per month, or $55 for an annual membership.
Sook-Yin Lee and Gong Gong Gong 工工工 Tap into the Universal Language of Music
Leslie Ken Chu
“There’s so many different future possibilities for what artist organizing can look like,” Pelly says. “And hopefully, as time goes on, more of it becomes more and more collective.”
Thank you for supporting our work. We literally could not do this without you.
— Tom Beedham
Editorial: Daniel G. Wilson, Tabassum Siddiqui (public editor), Michael Rancic, Leslie Ken Chu, Sarah Chodos, Tom Beedham (features editor)
Community: Daniel G. Wilson, Michael Rancic, Rosie Long Decter (lead)
Care: Tabassum Siddiqui (Public Editor), Sarah Chodos (lead), Tom Beedham
Organization: Michael Rancic, Leslie Ken Chu, Tom Beedham
Budget: Michael Rancic, Leslie Ken Chu
Web: Laura Stanley (lead), Michael Rancic, Leslie Ken Chu
