General

Mel: I feel strongly that artists should NOT have to use social media, for their work to be seen and heard. Even apps like Mastodon Thank you for calling out that Fediverse social media is still social media, and this comes always with trade offs. So... in the old days of music creation, "all you needed" was a meeting place where interesting artists would get together and share. Could be a music club, a magazine, a label... First they met, others would join, and they would figure the next steps after meeting, creating and sharing music. Is it possible that we are putting too much emphasis in software architecture and tech and too little on actually choosing a place (online) and call it our home, our shared studio? Look at the Bonkwave thing, their made... a hashtag their home and you have what looks like a fun and thriving community now. Mel: continue using CC music only CC music makes prototyping and testing easier, because money and restrictions to play and share don't play an important role. Once some good exists for the CC music use case, and a first user base exists, building the features for money and restrictive licenses should be easier. But they should be in the roadmap of the open source project from the start, so nobody feels cheated, enshittified down the line.

@lorenzosmusic If you've posted about it on the fediverse, link us so we can boost it. Or if there's an official account for the event, link us to that. Or both.

bandwagon: .” I’m a little hesitant to track users’ locations, Good point, the whole scheme would need some careful, privacy-protecting UX design. bandwagon: The starting point might be to establish a working partnership with ONE local shop So, run a pilot with a music shop or venue willing to be a guinea pig, and use that to test the concept, and experiment with the tech. I love this idea! I'm friendly with the crew at Nivara Lounge, and I reckon they'd be keen. Maybe we could tie it in with Synth Obscura somehow?

There's been some questions so I'll answer them here. Firstly I'll say that this is just the submissions stage. Tracks submitted obviously remain the sole property of the rights holder and the artists maintain rights. The tracks can be exclusively made for this or an older teack as long as the submitter owns all rights with no conditions. Once curated the artists retain all rights and are in effect giving their permissson for the compilation to prsent their work. There are no fees or charges from them to me, or from me to them. Exclusivity: Tracks made specifically for this compilation will be used by mutual agreement that they arent released by the artist for 3 months after publication. This is simply so that if artists have their own fanbase it helps boost the cause of the compilation. The more original tracks the better. It builds a momentum in the community. Format: bandcamp download, vinyl and CD. Profit and payments: as mentioned above, theres no fee or charges in either direction. When people buy the compilation, all profits will go to Amnesty International. This means that every penny/cent after sellers fees and bandcamp cut etc will go to the charity. Elasticstage (vinyl and CD) takes about 80% of the money paid (because they are producing the physical media, on demand, for no charge). I hope this clears some things up?

Or pulling their work because of all the other, especially AI, things that Spotify is doing to devalue creators and creative content. I know I’m looking to pull my catalog from Spotify and have already stopped using Spotify as a platform.

I said I was going to simmer down for a while in the search and discovery topic. But I do want to address this, because it's the crux of the issue. Our analysis of the problem is going to determine our theory of change. So, what I said was; Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump We started with a world of record shops and many small websites. If that was adequate to the purpose, the DataFarming platforms would never have taken hold in the first place. And @timglorioso replied; Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump I contend the success of DataFarming platforms is due to the stickiness and frictionlessness of their commercial design, not because they are better for music and musicians I agree that they have never been better for music or musicians, in the long term. The comparison to junk food is apt. But they came to dominate because at first, they provided a much better experience for audiences. Once audiences were locked in, they started making it worse for them, but a better experience for their commercial partners. Mainly the corporate music publishers. As they too got locked in, the platforms could make it worse for them too, and start extracting the value for their shareholders. This is Cory Doctorow's basic theory of how enshttification works. He also talks about 4 forces that can prevent or roll back enshittification; credible exit, self-help, labour power and uncaptured regulation. I don't always agree with Cory, especially the casual misrepresentation of other schools of tech criticism. But his thesis on how and why platforms enshittify matches what I've been observing online since the DotCom bubble.

They organise on Matrix & Fedi, a few of us here are in the group!

Mel: We were talking to them for RFF community a while ago. But it transpired that they needed us to sort funding for it first! This isn't uncommon for tech projects in the solidarity economy. They don't have access to the VC pipeline, and the potential for future returns through IPO or acquisition by a larger competitor. So money needed for R&D, beyond the time and skills that enthusiasts volunteer, generally comes through grants, funded by governments or well-heeled not-for-profits. One thing I've noticed by watching this space for a while; there isn't a huge overlap between people who are good at developing new kinds of software, and people who are good at writing grant applications. Even in that overlap, writing multiple applications (to increase the chances of getting one) takes time away from software work, which is kind of counterproductive. So it's often better for people who need software adapted to their use case to write the grant applications. But they often don't get the grants either, because they struggle to prove that a working solution can be delivered for the money granted (why is another story). Meanwhile, another thing that makes it really hard for developers to get grants is the inability to prove demand for what they want funding to build. What I'm ambling towards here is that if a group could be coordinated here to put in a grant application for building a Bonfire Music flavour, with thorough technical input from the Bonfire team, there's a good chance you'd get funded. I'd suggest making a number of small grant applications to both tech-based funders (eg NGI0 and NlNet), and music-based ones. Random idea that may or may not work; include the full list of funders you intend to apply to in the grant applications. Encouraging them to backchannel and co-fund a grant big enough to cover the work needed.

ryushin: Is there any PR tools that are usueful for indie artists besides trusty old promo emails? I'm probably not your average music fan (if there is such a thing) but ... Looking in from the other end, where do I find new music? Word of mouth, especially in the case of live music. On podcasts I subscribe to, most of them specialising in specific kinds of music. Either by genres, like; electronic: Deep INsessioNZ hip-hop: BFM's True School ska: the sadly missed 100% ska Or by cross-genre slices, like; CC music: BugCast, NetWaves, Radio BSOTS Local music: 95bFM's Freak the Sheep Or slice on both angles, like; The Block Report (hip-hop) the also sadly missed Open MetalCast Other than that, I go to search portals which I know have a reasonably broad index; Free Music Archive, sometimes searched via open.audio, which is a fediverse-connected service set up by the original developers of FunkWhale, with similar goals to libre.fm BandCamp YouTub I used to read music magazines voraciously, back in the days when I used to trawl through the bargain bins in record stores. But I never really made the transition to reading music blogs. Although I do occasionally read articles on BC and listen to the accompanying playlist, and I'd be excited to dig into a federated version of this. If I'm the sort of person you think might enjoy your music, these are the sorts of places to get it featured. As @KristofferLislegaard says, the question to ask is; KristofferLislegaard: Where does my target audience hang out. ... and look for opportunities to get your music on those stages.

Ah I missed this thread! Great posts here, with great points. I think this idea of “frictionless” music listening, where all the choices are being made by unaccountable algorithms, is what we’re struggling against. It’s a similar situation to radio: mainstream corpo radio where the DJs can’t even choose what they want to play. Human curation is relegated to smaller, community efforts. But because the idea of “choosing and buying singles or albums” is now so niche (physical or download), the likes of Spotify are now kinda the only game in town when it comes to music discovery. And, as @anon78643841 points out, being supported by their system isn’t even that great. So definitely, we have to rebuild our smaller DIY communities, and find ways to connect our communities together to rebuild DIY networks. ActivityPub is a lovely hub for that, in my experience, and similarly IRL community building like regular nights with different performers.

I guess I'm wondering if artists should have an opportunity to opt in (or out). I'm not sure why really, but I feel like we all put our music on BC with the expectation around how a listener would experience it. That is, they'd go to our BC page, look at a release, maybe read liner notes, choose what song to play, look at the cover art, etc. We have some agency around that experience. Whereas with playlists, we might have no control over how our music is experienced. Certainly, playlists have the potential to increase traffic to our Bandcamp pages, and that's great. But some artists might value maintaining control over that user experience, for whatever reason. They ought to have that opportunity.