What would a decentralized #fediverse#BandCamp service look like? I'll obviously support bandcamp until the bitter end and I hope it ends up fine and this is all nothing to worry about. But I think it's an interesting question.
I have some ideas but I'm interested in hearing from others.
@mrcompletely There was talk over on Substack (on a Ted Goia thread) that Substack would be a good landing spot for Bandcamp and there could be a subscription model, where fans could subscribe to artists who could supply new releases, demos, and the like. It's not a bad idea, except... we should be shrinking not growing platforms.
@mrcompletely My general thought is there needs to be a way for Bandcamp to exit and grow as it is and not be subsumed into a gated place. The ability for independent artist to sell downloads, merch, physical copies, directly connect with fans (that email function is honestly their "killer app") AND have high quality content around all of it is unique and should be preserved.
@thediemustfall the email thing you can replicate easily with a third party. Hopefully bandcamp just survives. But I was able to pretty fully imagine a service where each artist or label would own their own instance, bear the cost, get all the revenue, and would get network effects by connecting to each other and to fans via mastodon. I like the idea of just killing the middleman totally.
The sponsor/subscription/Patreon model is a killer one BC should do or should be in whatever replaces it 💯
@mrcompletely been thinking about this. what i want is to follow artists, not join another platform. i would love (& have basically tailored my feeds as such) the ability to just follow & keep track of artists, which forwards to wherever the music lives. more like RSS for music, maybe, that can be customized for artists & fed into my mastodon feed. every time a new track appears on bandcamp or soundcloud or wherever, i get notified in my regular feed.
@bourgwick heh. From an end user/fan perspective that's exactly what I spec'd out when spitballing in the group chat. But I think you could provide a turnkey Fedi service for bands and labels that would manage music streaming, downloads and physical merch sales. They'd bear the cost of bandwidth but keep 100% of revenue otherwise. And fans could follow from any federated platform (like masto). Add a Patreon like function to sponsor a band for free/early/extra stuff and it sounds pretty ok to me
@bourgwick i thought this idea all the way through from a software design perspective, I think. It should just work, very much on the Mastodon model and without fans needing to join anything new unless they lack a Fediverse account and want to follow the network features. I can visualize the architecture, as we call it in the nerd biz. Just need a full stack lead developer or two who love music and have a year of free time to spare to build it and I could start writing specs lol
@mrcompletely that sounds v good too, maybe i'm describing a secondary service or adjacent protocol that funnels notifications into the fediverse from other platforms. presumably many artists wouldn't move from their current digital homes (& if bandcamp splinters there will be many new competing platforms) & it'd be so nice to be able to navigate that in one place.
@bourgwick sure well this imaginary service would do that directly, a mastodon account could follow a band or label and get its posts directly. An aggregator to RSS is a good idea too if there's a diaspora but at you've seen it's dependent on each end platform/service having some kind of machine readable feed
@mrcompletely i don't really know enough about this stuff to know if it's possible, but (to bypass relying on the other platforms) i suppose i envisioned the new service maintaining ghost accounts that follow/monitor artists on traditional platforms & sorting out the proper notifications to the new service. backend would have to be updated when the services change. maybe that'd get blocked by the platforms?
@bourgwick for an automated system, even if it's logged in, there has to be something specific it can interpret as a "post" and parse for content to report back. Without some common structure (like RSS or email) that would have to be figured out and coded uniquely for each platform. If they send bandcamp-like emails, those would likely be the easiest to parse instead of recrawling web pages daily or whatever (which yes could be blocked somewhat)
@mrcompletely many years ago, circa 2006, my friends had a start-up called critical metrics (at the height of the mp3 age, when many sites reviewed/rated singles) to aggregate & chart new & historical track recommendations & serve them back by youtube (i think). it worked like a damn miracle for like 2 weeks until some of the APIs/feeds started changing & they could never keep up. but (despite pesky real world details like that) universal cross-site aggregators are probably my actual ideal.
@bourgwick i do like the idea. I am just enamored of the idea of killing the music sales middleman totally. Band or label direct to consumer transaction.
@bourgwick the takeaway is yes, maybe something like that could work if there are the right endpoints to grab on to, which don't necessarily have to be provided intentionally, but it could also turn out to be very hard
@mrcompletely case in point, just learned that bandcamp used to have RSS but killed it in 2017 or so. yeah, any service like what i'm describing would require dedicated maintenance & more a listener/community service than for artists. i saw a bandcamp alternative called faircamp, maybe aligns some (in a non fedi way) with what you're thinking about. https://codeberg.org/simonrepp/faircamp
@mrcompletely yeah, i guess I’ll keep using it (and religiously downloading immediately after purchase), but it feels like it’s about to get much shittier very quickly.
@torstentorsten could be a starting point for the streaming component. I think the largest fundamental issue though is that bandcamp is at root a commercial platform and even if there was no central business taking a cut the platform would need to 1) handle e-commerce transactions 2) support lossless downloads gated by purchase and 3) work for physical inventory sales
The fact that it's got an inherent business component may make it incompatible with the Fediverse per se
@mrcompletely there used to be a music streaming coop named #resonate. Unfortunatelly they seem to be in a not so good state atm. Maybe #ampled is something that's interesting for you?
@mrcompletely@torstentorsten I don't see the federated model as "incompatible" with the Fediverse model ~ even a distributed system can generate a secure access token based on purchase or subscription (or time-based access) ~ or simply redirect to a store for the financial transaction and download
@tuneslist@torstentorsten yeah I don't think the business aspect is any problem technically, it's the social minefield of doing capitalism in Fedi. But if your platform isn't a biz and the artists are selling directly then it's no problem imo. Funkwhale is just streaming at this point but it could be a start or could be forked, though the name is truly dreadful
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