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?)
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.
Or it could simply be decentralized in the sense thatb producers could take care of online distribution themselves instead of relying on third party services, or it’s perfectly fine to have centralized services for some things and it’s normal to see some of those services come and go.
The issue is “discoverability”. Producers “taking care of online distribution themselves” are dealing with, you know, the very problem that they are not discoverable. Unless they’re on a third-party service, of course.
A commercial centralized discoverability service would enshittify REALLY quickly because of the profit motive. First they’d make everything nice for both listers and consumers. Make themselves indispensable to listers. Then lock the listers into an abusive relationship with no viable means out. (Kind of like bandcamp, come to think of it!) And once they’ve squeezed every last ounce out of the listers, the consumers get the screws next since there’s no viable option for them to escape to.
A non-profit foundation has no profit motive (by definition) so has no incentive whatsoever to enshittify.
Or, you know, the music creators could seize the means of distribution and take care of it themselves… Again, discoverability for anything that’s decentralized has yet to be proven better than a centralized solution. I never search answers to issues on Lemmy, I search on Reddit or Steam forums (for game issues). I don’t go on Google to look for new music, I go on Spotify.
Anyway, what’s the advantage for the artists exactly? They need to trust Sir_poop_up_my_butt with their music on their server and hope that they don’t just go offline at some point rendering their music inaccessible just like the content of some instances just disappeared because people got bored with Lemmy and hosting their instance?
I think a better solution to the current default model here would be splitting this up.
Give the artists a service where they provide their music, nothing else. They just upload the files, metadata, pricing. Only the technical side of things. Then another service is for the end user to actually listen to the music, but instead of having that content on the end-user service they only connect to the artist platform. For this to work there needs to be a default hub to which every artist service is automatically federated. (On that topic, why is it so hard to just federate entire instances everywhere in the fediverse, I get the moderation workload would be insane but it really works against the idea of decentralization)
Also another problem entirely is dealing with the payment providers, afaik they really don’t play ball with tiny platforms so getting support for those into the service would probably be a pain