Back

If anyone has any leads for how to tap into, or start, a conversation about what a #coop run music platform like bandcamp could look like please let me know.

It seems like there must be a very large number of people who would be supportive of a cooperatively run AND FUN site like Bandcamp, that was self sustaining, supported artists, supported its workers, and had a clear governance model.

If it was open-source and could federate that would be great of course too. But first things first.

3/3

PS. I might need to blame @dchud & ️ for prompting this line of thinking. It's not the first time I've had wild ideas after a conversation with him :-)

@edsu @dchud yes yes yes yes!

I keep taggging the Bandcamp union @bandcampunited to see if they're interested.

Would it be an insider trading illegal thingy if the rest of the employees quit in solidarity and then bought the newely tanked company to make it a co-op / worker self-directed enterprise?

@kostyn @bandcampunited Yes I've been wondering something similar. I guess there may be NDAs at play?

It seems like (in theory) what @Gargron did for Mastodon riffing off of TweetDeck could be repeated for some new app that riffs off of Bandcamp?

@mike yes, I have a bit. It is easily installed with yunohost in fact!

Maybe this is offbase, but it seems to be oriented around decentralized sharing with friends than helping artists & labels get paid for their work and having fans who help support them?

I suspect those features could be added on? I also think there is value in having some centralization & governance so that artists can focus on their work rather than sysadmin? But maybe there could be a recognizable & trusted instance?

@edsu I don't know anything about it myself, only that it exists.

And yes, for regular bands to use it, it would need there to be one or more trusted hosts so they don't have to think about this stuff.

@edsu and if it isn't open source and it doesn't federate (ie build on FunkWhale/Castopod), then how is it different to the previous efforts?

More importantly, how does a musician, who wants to be making music not navigating platform politics, know the new effort won't go the same way as the others?

I can't find the link rn but there was a call from a group of musicians asking people to not start pitching the latest platform at them, that they don't want fads, they want a long term answer.

@nicol thanks for the reminder that this work has been ongoing and has been overshadowed by Bandcamp as it rose. Maybe this is a moment where artists can discover these alternatives and fans can follow them there? Have you seen a primer for artists who are looking to jump and need help navigating the choices?

I'm a software developer so I'm susceptible to the idea that it's a tooling problem. I do think tools matter, but maybe secondarily to governance and trust.

@nicol I forgot to say, if you can relocate that thread that would be awesome!

@edsu I will search on my desktop browser later.

I'd also be v happy to discuss this further. I've been thinking about decentralised/federatable indie media distribution /sustainability systems for a very long time. There *are* gaps in the tooling still, & while governance is key my gut tells me the DISCO model (federate not scale) is the best bet as it most closely approximates what indie music (labels/shops/venues) used to be like before the majors swallowed all, then Spotify swallowed them.

@nick thanks Nick! I know tech is going to tech, but I will be interested to see if some of these efforts frontload the governance side of things and then get into how to assemble the various pieces. As much of a fan I am of decentralization, I think it needs to take a back seat to how the thing will be run once money starts moving around?

@edsu this is actually one persons analysis of why resonate failed to achieve their goals:

"I’ve always kind of had the opinion that Resonate does some amazing conceptual co-operative governance but that governance was way ahead of what the product (software) actually offered."

https://community.resonate.coop/t/addressing-our-current-crisis-community-input-needed/3605/9

@edsu much open source software seems to start by an initial burst of development "unencumbered" by process...

.. but whether it can later be community owned/run is unclear.

There are many pitfalls with either approach, community now vs later....

@edsu I think resonate is a really great case study of the challenges in getting co-operative alternatives up and running.

I don't know if there is a proper write up of it somewhere to learn from, there should be... probably many different perspectives though... so much to learn from failure.

A while back I spent a while reading around on the forum to get a sense of what happened, sad times!

@nick I would read that blog post from you :-)

@edsu I'm so peripheral to the project (i.e. of no connection at all), and it would be quite some effort to do a fair job of it given the complexity of what seemed to happen. Maybe someone else could :)

@nick yeah understood ... this has been helpful what you've written so far, so thank you for doing that reading and sharing it here.

@nonlinear are you thinking of Brave support for IPFS? I know PeerTube uses webtorrent which I believe lets you do torrent downloads in any JavaScript + WebRTC supporting browser?

It would be interesting to learn more about Bandcamp's infrastructure for streaming. I believe their downloads come from Fastly CDN. Having infrastructure set up to Just Work and not be some tech experiment is part of why working with the web we have is important.

@edsu The issue is apple... Lemme tell you what's going on.

Apple, to maintain the 30% cut they get from app store, demand that any browser for iOS to in fact use Safari engine, with just bells and whistles on top.

All iOS browsers are in fact safari, a browser that willingly refuses to accept new browser features like P2P sharing (like IPFS and others).

Of course, since Apple profits twice from rejecting modern browsers.

@edsu Apple does *worse* than when Microsoft bundled explorer browser as default on Windows machines and were sued for it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

I wish people knew more about it, because it's a clearly an antitrust issue. It's worse than default it's mandatory.

@edsu I guess you can have any kinda app, but if it's a browser, it needs to be safari engine.

It's all very arbitrary, I know. But allowing modern browsers would mean death of apps, since tools could ask user to use so-and-so browser instead.

Maybe a full on app with p2p sharing features, but that means you still need to pay 30% to apple.

Or not. Netflix doesn't pay. It's a might is right situation.

@edsu And I dunno if IPFS is the solution. There's dav,others. It would be nice if app abstracts the engine it uses, as long as it's seamless to listeners.

But whatever Bandcamp alternative should use mastodon governance model (instances as servers, think record labels) and a p2p streaming engine.

@nonlinear you know, I was just thinking this morning, that I replacing Bandcamp with something better is largely a UX / Design problem (apart from the governance issues). I think that's what Mastodon (copy TweetDeck) taught us about dislodging Twitter. If people have something familiar to use that isn't run by icky people they will start to move.

@nonlinear but getting the rough edges rounded off, and things looking beautiful is not a developer problem, and isn't really a decentralization problem either. Mastodon seemed to prioritize being usable, and being fun to use, and it helped a lot I think.

@nonlinear a good design is developed and honed over time to the point where users barely notice it anymore because it fits so well. Those designs should be learned from and built on and not reinvented (unless you need to, or have to).