I’m not sure where to discuss this so I’m posting here since this is the hub of FOSS advocates.
I had a really interesting conversation with a friend about the Bandcamp situation and as we were discussing it occured to me that something like PeerTube but for music doesn’t really exist. Which doesn’t make sense in my mind as it’s so much less cost to host and so useful. Half of Youtube’s audience mainly goes there for music.
So, I don’t know, does it make sense for anyone else to work on something Fediverse-based (Activity Pub) that is aimed at music creators?
I would even go as far as allow the creators to host ads on their page so as to attract as many of them as possible. Controversial but we have to take one step at a time to change mindsets. Right now, the situation is that you have to put up with massive advertising or go the FOSS way and depend on donations.
What do you guys think?
I think this is a great topic. I think it comes down to incentives. Artists going to the trouble of writing music, practicing, recording, editing and publishing probably expect to make some money. Individual artists who have low overhead and are doing it for the love of it probably have a better experience on Youtube as that’s where the audience is?
Not wrong but it would be a nice alternative at the very least. That’s why I talked about ads so they also have an incentive beyond donations if they want to monetize. Perhaps a download button with the itch.io system would also be an option. It’s just something that doesn’t exist yet and I think has great potential.
Ads are a technical challenge. It is easy to track how many users are listening to a stream, and therefore how many users hear an ad. The hard part is keeping instance admins from faking these results to overcharge for ads, since they have full control over the computing equipment that are tracking listeners to ads.
Should just be each instance has its own ads and transmits them to the stream you’re listening to
But no one will buy ad space on your instance unless they can confirm that their ads are reaching your audience.
The best way I can think of to sell ad space is to put digital markers in the stream to denote an ad. Then the advertiser can retrieve the stream, search for the markers in the stream, and confirm that the ad was broadcast to the audience, and how often. Or you could just use machine learning now to detect whether your ad was played, but using markers is probably way simpler and cheaper to do.
The hard part is getting everyone to agree on the technical details, like the stream protocol, of how markers can be included in a stream and how to detect them.
The question is whether you trust the instances with their numbers. If you don’t, you need tracking that calls back to a third party server. Not everyone will agree to being tracked like this, though
Musicians (and all artists) ultimately want to get their art in front of an audience.
Right now the existing big platforms serve that purpose.
Any new service is in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation trying to attract an audience with no content and trying to attract content with no audience.