Bandcamp... What now?
Bandcamp... What now?
Now that Bandcamp has had huge layoffs, what about an opensource, Fediverse-friendly replacement? What can a FOSS product bring to the community and do better than Bandcamp?
- Discoverability?
- Broader selection of payments platforms? Direct transfer to avoid processors? (I'm ignorant about the processing system, plus international considerations)
- Ease of spinning up (SaaS?)
- Content deliverability (on the fly transcode from sourced FLAC or WAVs? Rich video/multi track audio?)
Average fediverse user seeing a platform undergo changes they dislike:
An artist posting on LinkedIn is what inspired my post. But I suppose a for-profit private company is probably the solution to it.
“Hey why don’t we just copy a website that has 800k daily visitors?”
For me the most important criterias are:
- ownership: I buy, I get to download (re-download) the files and use then how ever I please
- astists get a fair share: I want to maximize the share of the money I've spent going to the artists, and I would like the platform to be transparent, showing me with each purchase how much goes to the artitst for creating more art (if self-hosted by the artist herself/himself, this cost is then deduced)
I personally don't care for streaming.
I would challenge "unlimited" re-download in a FOSS market. This puts the long-term hosting on the market, vs the user, and is a challenge for current platforms. Perhaps re-download for a time, and of course DRM free is the key.
I would challenge your definition of streaming. I host all my own music and I stream it all the time via Airsonic-advanced (though it does get cached - and it's constantly downloading new podcast episodes). For me it's just the level of accessibility I consider as "streaming".
criterias
Like 'email', this noun doesn't need an 's'.
Right about criteria, wrong about emails.
Funkwhale is the fedi alternative for music. You should go post your feature list onto their forum.
I just took a look at faircamp, it seems nice too.
Dogmazic.net is also a music platform (centralised) made with ampache.
Yes! I was wondering how Funkwhale could be leveraged here.
I've been thinking a lot about this. I think a fedi-connected, self-hosted Bandcamp alternative would be huge for discoverability and helping fans keep tabs on new releases, tour dates, etc... As a musician it'd be great to be able to have fans be alerted right away when you post a new track or tour date, and as a fan it'd be awesome to be able to follow artists that you like from other fedi-compatible platforms.
I'm not a web dev myself so I don't really know for sure, but I think the biggest challenge is probably not even content delivery but keeping track of ownership/library. It's really nice that you can log into Bandcamp and access a library of all of the albums/songs that you've previously bought, and I'm not sure how something like that could be emulated in a federated way. It might be possible, I just don't know how!
Also it'd be nice to be able to stream your library, and when your library is distributed across multiple federated servers I don't know if that becomes more difficult to implement.
Still, I'm with you. I'd love to see a federated alternative to Bandcamp, even if it takes some years to reach maturity or feature parity.
Huge for discoverability? Mate, googling for shit that's on Lemmy sucks. Decentralization isn't the answer to everything.
Indeed, discoverability is the largest problem for people in the Fediverse and there doesn't seem to be a simple solution for it.
Perhaps what's needed is a charitable, non-profit foundation (properly registered) whose sole purpose is to give artists an opt-in place to register their social links, samples, etc. Then the content can be on the Fediverse in various forms (depending on medium and artist desires) but where catalogues can be easily scanned and followed.
Well it's currently quite new and immature. I've said for a while that a decent system for searching the fediverse would be search engines maintaining their own instances purely for indexing purposes. They would retrieve posts via default federation, and if an instance wants to opt out of a given search engine, it's as simple as defederating from that instance. They would also ideally provide links that users can open on their home instances.
This is more a scale and mainstreaming issue than a federation issue. Once the fediverse is big enough major search engines will have to adapt or be left behind.
One thing that most reddit alumni won't care about, but one of the nicest things about doing it decentralized is censorship resistance.
Bandcamp at some point decided that the political views of the artists on their platform are a reason to get rid of some artists.
You might not see a problem since you agree with bandcamp's politics, but companies change their politics on a dime when it becomes useful to do so.
One problem with open source commercial sites is you're typically going to need business partners to handle credit card transactions.
What political views did they censor?
They took down tim pools music, and recently I went to buy some mp3s of a guy who opposes covid mandates and he was banned too.
Again, lots of folks might disagree with both those people, but when it comes to shit like this you are always next.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-bandcamp-removes-timcast-five-times-august-from-platform
Been using self-hosted, static website builder https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ with satisfying results here
Take a look at this project started with many of those goals in mind: https://code.communitymedia.network/MountainTownTechnology/aural_isle
Sounds good, tho they're not finished yet, hope it works out for them.
Has there been any purchasable content in the Fediverse so far?
Good question, I don't know. I know I've seen people selling things in Mastodon but that's been my extent of experience.
Do you know this: https://radiofreefedi.net/
Excellent link, thanks!
All of these ideas are great and all but at the end of the day I will be forced to use what ever the scene I am into decides is best and therefore I can find the biggest selection of music to buy.
Currently band camp is the defacto for most releases (except for some idiotic vinyl only bullshit) within the scene I am into, but even if a great alternative is made if they don't start selling the music I want on there then it'll be impossible for me to use.
I think as much effort to expose a band camp alternative to artists is needed as there is needed to create the thing so people and artists can come together in said place.
Time to go back to limewire
A shame this is now defunct.
Perhaps some sort of collectively owned service.
Or a non profit like Wikipedia that all it does is host and sell music.
Whatever it is needs to be resistant to the standard shifty capitalism problems. It should focus on providing a good service and making enough money to support itself. Not infinite profits forever.
Wait, hear me out. Direct buy from artists using crypto. Then you don't have to deal with payment processors.
Cryptoscam shill is shilling the cryptoscam.
It's amazing to me that anybody considers crypto"currency" to be a viable currency these days after all the failures of the (... uh ... you know that "exchanges" are payment processors right? RIGHT!? ...) ecosystem to the tune of now billions of dollars.
But hey, you can at least send your funny money on a public ledger (for PRIVACY! LOL!) and have it get processed painfully slowly while contributing to more greenhouse gases than most medium-sized nations!
There's literally no downside!
You don't need to use an exchange to get paid in crypto or use a crypto with a pubic ledger
Monero is far more private than letting a credit card processor have your information. Ethereum doesn't use mining anymore so the electricity used for it is less than paying with credit card. It also takes a few seconds to process.
why though? Direct buy sure but why crypto? Just because you can send Disney bucks directly to someone?
Just use Kofi or Patreon and you are golden.
Because I've tried getting money from countries like Kazakhstan and it's not straightforward
Sure, if you have a merchant account and want to pay 3%+ on a credit card purchase it would work, just set up visa and Mastercard
But for the smaller band, they would not be taking credit card payments themselves