Promotion strategies

Filthy rich and powerful labels may own the final product, but they can’t own your creation process. At least, it’s not common to sell the creation process for an art piece because it’s usually not marketable, not easily so.
I still think this is the best thing we have as artists: the time we invest in our work is valuable, and we can leverage it. If we show our trials, our errors and failures, our successes of course, however big or small they may be, it will help people see the value in our art even more.
However my reasoning falls totally flat as the quality or popularity of an art piece can never be directly paralleled to the amount of work that was invested but it’s a possible promotion strategy nonetheless !

How would we go about it ? Taste/appreciation is so subjective. Like in love or friendship where a sign of appreciation depends on the individuals involved and their context, a sign of appreciation from a person to an art piece can be very complex and take many forms. You may never leave a single like or comment under an artist’s publication, never give them any money, but still thoroughly enjoy their work.
For example: i love music, i really do. I listen to music about once or twice a month, the rest of the time i’m the one making music. Some tracks stay with me for days or weeks, i hum them out loud or hear them in my mind. How would you build an online discovery system which accomodates that ?
Do we need to teach music lovers how to interact with a system we deemed “beneficial” so that every person involved, listeners and artists alike, enjoy the process and benefit from it ? This isn’t a rethorical question by the way, i’m really wondering: we’ve been taught to interact with art and media in general in a certain way… should we unlearn that ?

EDIT: just read the other topic about promotion on the Fediverse, lots of post that could be cross referenced here, but i’ll just quote Icaria this time:

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

This is incredible context, thank you!

July 2025

July 2025

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. For the last 3 months, I’ve been hard at work on something I’m finally ready to announce:

You Can Now Sell Your Albums on Bandwagon.fm

Earlier today, I launched one of the largest updates ever for Bandwagon and Emissary: the ability to charge visitors for the creative content you post online. There are many facets of this, so I’ll try to walk you through your new tools and how they work down below, but here are the highlights:

• Use Your Own Stripe Account
• Sell albums as one-time sales
• Sell memberships to “Circles” that can receive exclusive, non-public posts from you
• 0% commission fees. Your money is yours
• Online sales are free for now, but will become a paid feature when Bandwagon Premier is read
• Limited to Stripe for now, no PayPal. Additional payment processors coming later

Ok. Let’s jump into the details…

Connecting To Stripe

Our initial plans were to support at least two payment processors: Stripe and PayPal. During the long odyssey that was this project, there were a number of technical limitations that forced me to cut PayPal from the list. So for now, online sales is limited to Stripe only.

Fortunately, Stripe is a fantastic payment processor that is easy to use and very secure. To get started go to your Profile > Settings > Payments and connect to your Stripe account. If you don’t already use Stripe, it’s easy to sign up from this same section.

Sell Albums Online

It’s remarkably easy to sell stuff with Bandwagon:

1. You start by creating a new Stripe account, or connecting an existing account.
2. To keep things simple and secure, we’re using Stripe’s “Product Catalog” feature. Just set up one or more products in Stripe, then you can link them to the albums you’ve already posted on Bandwagon.
3. Last, you can upload a number of digital files that people get when they purchase your album. This should be digital music files in a number of open formats, liner notes, and anything else you want to give people when they buy.

You can sell albums using any of the options in Stripe’s Product Catalog, including fixed pricing or “pay what you want” pricing. You can also set up multiple prices for a single album, so your fans can pick one that works for them.

Sell “Circle” Memberships

This release also includes “Circles” – a new way of sharing specific content with specific people. When you add your followers to a circle, you can then make posts exclusively for that group. This should work great for fan clubs, insider groups, and more.

You can add people directly into a circle for free, OR you can put this up for sale just like an album. Stripe’s recurring subscription payment products let you charge small recurring payments every month for membership in the circle. Your fans can cancel whenever they want.

Circles even work seamlessly with album sales, so you can give those same digital downloads to circle members as well. You might want to do this if you let fan club members have copies of older albums included in their memberships. Or, you might add an industry rep to a circle for free as an easy way to share pre-release albums with them.

Pricing and Bandwagon Premier

With this release, pricing is also coming into focus. To start, Bandwagon.fm will not take a cut of your album sales or memberships. Our cut of your sales will be 0%. Please keep in mind that Stripe will still charge transaction (as with any payment processor).

But online sales will not be completely free. It will be a part of “Bandwagon Premier” - a paid service on our Roadmap that I still intend to launch by the end of the year. The details are still to be worked out, but the outline is coming into focus.

Here’s the current plan:

Bandwagon ($FREE)

• Available now and forever. There will always be a free option.
• Free custom profile with links to all of your streaming and online identities
• Upload albums for free
• Lower bitrate audio streaming
• Publish music to independent radio stations like The Indie Beat
• Share pre-release material with industry insiders

Bandwagon Premier ($10/month)

• Launching later this year
• Sell albums - 0% platform fee
• Sell circles/memberships - 0% platform fee
• High bitrate streaming
• Publish and stream high quality video
• Embeddable music player
• Other cool stuff I’m still working out…

Other Payment Processors

I am still collecting a short list of additional payment processors to consider. And I’d love to hear your thoughts about payment methods that work best for you. Here’s the list as of today:

July 2025

July 2025

Sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted here. For the last 3 months, I’ve been hard at work on something I’m finally ready to announce:

You Can Now Sell Your Albums on Bandwagon.fm

Earlier today, I launched one of the largest updates ever for Bandwagon and Emissary: the ability to charge visitors for the creative content you post online. There are many facets of this, so I’ll try to walk you through your new tools and how they work down below, but here are the highlights:

• Use Your Own Stripe Account
• Sell albums as one-time sales
• Sell memberships to “Circles” that can receive exclusive, non-public posts from you
• 0% commission fees. Your money is yours
• Online sales are free for now, but will become a paid feature when Bandwagon Premier is read
• Limited to Stripe for now, no PayPal. Additional payment processors coming later

Ok. Let’s jump into the details…

Connecting To Stripe

Our initial plans were to support at least two payment processors: Stripe and PayPal. During the long odyssey that was this project, there were a number of technical limitations that forced me to cut PayPal from the list. So for now, online sales is limited to Stripe only.

Fortunately, Stripe is a fantastic payment processor that is easy to use and very secure. To get started go to your Profile > Settings > Payments and connect to your Stripe account. If you don’t already use Stripe, it’s easy to sign up from this same section.

Sell Albums Online

It’s remarkably easy to sell stuff with Bandwagon:

1. You start by creating a new Stripe account, or connecting an existing account.
2. To keep things simple and secure, we’re using Stripe’s “Product Catalog” feature. Just set up one or more products in Stripe, then you can link them to the albums you’ve already posted on Bandwagon.
3. Last, you can upload a number of digital files that people get when they purchase your album. This should be digital music files in a number of open formats, liner notes, and anything else you want to give people when they buy.

You can sell albums using any of the options in Stripe’s Product Catalog, including fixed pricing or “pay what you want” pricing. You can also set up multiple prices for a single album, so your fans can pick one that works for them.

Sell “Circle” Memberships

This release also includes “Circles” – a new way of sharing specific content with specific people. When you add your followers to a circle, you can then make posts exclusively for that group. This should work great for fan clubs, insider groups, and more.

You can add people directly into a circle for free, OR you can put this up for sale just like an album. Stripe’s recurring subscription payment products let you charge small recurring payments every month for membership in the circle. Your fans can cancel whenever they want.

Circles even work seamlessly with album sales, so you can give those same digital downloads to circle members as well. You might want to do this if you let fan club members have copies of older albums included in their memberships. Or, you might add an industry rep to a circle for free as an easy way to share pre-release albums with them.

Pricing and Bandwagon Premier

With this release, pricing is also coming into focus. To start, Bandwagon.fm will not take a cut of your album sales or memberships. Our cut of your sales will be 0%. Please keep in mind that Stripe will still charge transaction (as with any payment processor).

But online sales will not be completely free. It will be a part of “Bandwagon Premier” - a paid service on our Roadmap that I still intend to launch by the end of the year. The details are still to be worked out, but the outline is coming into focus.

Here’s the current plan:

Bandwagon ($FREE)

• Available now and forever. There will always be a free option.
• Free custom profile with links to all of your streaming and online identities
• Upload albums for free
• Lower bitrate audio streaming
• Publish music to independent radio stations like The Indie Beat
• Share pre-release material with industry insiders

Bandwagon Premier ($10/month)

• Launching later this year
• Sell albums - 0% platform fee
• Sell circles/memberships - 0% platform fee
• High bitrate streaming
• Publish and stream high quality video
• Embeddable music player
• Other cool stuff I’m still working out…

Other Payment Processors

I am still collecting a short list of additional payment processors to consider. And I’d love to hear your thoughts about payment methods that work best for you. Here’s the list as of today:

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Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

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.

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.

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

And yeah, I do get the vibe @strypey about preferring to sidestep industry bodies. Ideally we wouldn’t need any of this. But we are all living under capitalism with no way to escape it, for now. Musicians and music fans have bank accounts and jobs and paypals and all sorts of not-ideal workarounds, to deal with the fact we need money for basic survival.

So, some alternatives to using something like the PRS/PPL thing:

• continue using CC music only, or opt-in models for broadcast — with artists hopefully receiving individual donations to support their work
• Invent our own micropayment scheme, get payment details for all artists separately

Both of these require some kind of payment intermediary. So I reckon the PRS/PPL approach is just another way to do it — where most working musicians would already be aware of it, and have their bank details all set up already. AND Peter Thiel or whoever doesn’t get a cut of every payment! Bonus

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

And more and more, I’m thinking I should include this idea in our present funding application round lol

But maybe keep it separate from existing Fedi radios, so they can continue to operate as they do?

It does generate a fair bit of extra admin though, so the more people who wanna help out the better!

Netlabel day 2025 on July 14

@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.

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

The point is, with this “radio” model: the broadcaster pays, not the audience. So, in the case of the UK:

• a broadcaster would pay PPL and PRS something like £200 per year, each
• report what music we used
• PPL pay the people who made the recordings, and PRS pays the songwriters
• PRS and PPL will arrange to pay international musicians from their own countries’ rights societies

We might be able to kick this process off with getting a funding body to cover these licenses for 1-2 years. Then, maybe look at an Opencollective for donations to keep the thing running.

The alternative is to do like Radio Free Fedi did, or Bandwagon/Indie Beat does: each musician’s work is broadcast “with permission”. So the radio is still fantastic for discovery — but artists don’t get paid as they do with regular radio.

Overview of Bandcamp features

Please note: The following is not intended as an attack on any of these awesome projects or the people behind them. It’s a Use eXperience story, intended to illustrate a series of points (see the Takeaway sections below).

As I mentioned it on the thread about discoverability, the main things I use BandCamp for are search and sample listening. Classic example, just now while doing a web search for something else, I stumbled on a debut album by a Canadian band called Penny Diving, via the homepage of the label releasing it;

I’d like to find out where I can listen to some of their songs, to see what I think of them. Normally I’d search for them on BandCamp (or YouTub), because it’s the place I most consistently get useful results. But as an experiments, let’s try listening another way.

Takeaway: Nobody ever pays for music we’ve never heard. Except maybe live, if we’re going with a friend who’s a big fan.

I look around the page for a listening post, or a link to one, but my attention gets hijacked by the colourful popup at bottom-right, trying to social engineer me into giving it my email address. Ick.

Takeaway: Don’t use Deceptive Patterns in your pages. Whether on your own band or label homepage, or on discovery platforms and other service portals. If want contact information, just straight up say so, and tell me exactly what you do and don’t intend to use it for.

At least the popup goes away when I click close, but the page still has no way for me to listen, just a bunch of ways to pay. But … why would I pay when I have no idea if I like the music yet?

Takeaway: Put a listening post in the place where the payment happens. Ideally create a flow from general info page > simple listening experience > payment invitation.

Given it’s basically just a vending machine with no products in it, how do I know it really represents the band, and that any payment I make here goes to them? For all I know if could be a scam site.

Takeaway: There needs to be a reliable and standardised way to link indentities with works online. Using 2-way rel-me links to connect social network accounts with homepages is useful. Of course that’s less necessary if you’re on FunkWhale or BandWagon, because your homepage is in a social network, the fediverse.

So I go try to look it up on FunkWhale. Nothing on open.audio, the flagship service. Is it worth trying others, which ones? No sign of a search bar on funkwhale.audio, am I meant to search FW from Mastodon? Try that, tumbleweeds. BandWagon.fm? Nope. Mirlo? Nada. OpenVerse.org? Zip. Jam.coop? Can’t see a search bar …

Takeaway When music on non-corporate hosting is fragmented across many, tiny services, which must be search individually, most of the results will be disappointing. Even as a determined supporter, this experience is not a replacement for a BandCamp or a Spotify. I need to be able to go to one of many music discovery portals, and get some kind of useful result most times, or I’ll stop coming back. Federated search is the way to do that.

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

It’s certainly a question worth exploring. The CC community has been exploring the tension between universal access and fair renumeration since the turn of the millennium, and the software freedom movements for 20 years before that. So luckily we don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Some facts that I think are worth acknowledging as a basis for any discussion along these lines;

1. The Streisand Principle is a thing (as John Gilmore famously said, “the net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”).

2. This also applies to attempts to keep people from disseminating music and other media online, even before it started being born digital.

3. The RIAA, MPAA and other industry consortia invested in massive warchests for fighting “piracy” (unlicensed fan distribution). They failed, and it blew up in their faces quite spectacularly, just as it did when McVomits when they sued London Greenpeace for libel.

4. Which is why they switched strategy to licensing their media to low-friction platforms. Where fans can access it for a more reasonable fee than $1 per MP3 downloaded. Side note: the iTunes approach failed for the same reason all micropayments fail; people hate being nickel-and-dimed

5. Any system for getting audiences to pay artists for online distribution must start with the assumption that

a) it is optional, and always will be

b) we want we want to support artists (when we can afford to)

c) it’s the predatory intermediaries pirates are avoiding paying, not the artists

Random idea for an in-person media store app

Good point, the whole scheme would need some careful, privacy-protecting UX design.

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?

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

Ah, it’s a bit more of a long term idea, not for this funding round I’d say… but just wanted to put it out there!

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

Sounds like a really great idea! I so need to read up on how all this stuff works again. Let us know if we can do anything to help!

Netlabel day 2025 on July 14

The celebration of Netlabel Day is happening again this Monday, July 14! An event of creative commons music and open culture!

My band, Lorenzo’s Music, is taking part by releasing a remix album that day on the blocSonic Netlabel.

There will be a radio stream featuring music by tons of different creative commons netlabels that will be happening on Netlabel Day.

You can go to the netlabel day website for a link to the live radio stream
https://netlabelday.org/

And here is a link to a spreadsheet showing the schedule of music and hosts
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ALqXQFUNIoFAfaeAXtWKb3pxK_3YZjSP7r2LCb8lu9w/edit?usp=sharing

Also, they are still looking for people to participate in the radio stream. You can contact the person who runs it if you would like to host a segment of Open Culture/CC music. You can contact Omar on Mastodon
https://mastodon.social/@wiloma

Netlabel day 2025 on July 14

The celebration of Netlabel Day is happening again this Monday, July 14! An event of creative commons music and open culture!

My band, Lorenzo’s Music, is taking part by releasing a remix album that day on the blocSonic Netlabel.

There will be a radio stream featuring music by tons of different creative commons netlabels that will be happening on Netlabel Day.

You can go to the netlabel day website for a link to the live radio stream
https://netlabelday.org/

And here is a link to a spreadsheet showing the schedule of music and hosts
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ALqXQFUNIoFAfaeAXtWKb3pxK_3YZjSP7r2LCb8lu9w/edit?usp=sharing

Also, they are still looking for people to participate in the radio stream. You can contact the person who runs it if you would like to host a segment of Open Culture/CC music. You can contact Omar on Mastodon
https://mastodon.social/@wiloma

2 posts - 2 participants

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Random idea for an in-person media store app

This is an interesting concept, and a good use of “geo-tracking.” I’m a little hesitant to track users’ locations, but I’ll bet we could figure out a way to do it.

The starting point might be to establish a working partnership with ONE local shop, and work with them to tweak something that makes sense. The “carrot” would be some kind of exclusive arrangement for music that they couldn’t offer people otherwise. But again, boots on the ground are best for determining what would/wouldn’t work.

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

Oh not all of Fedi for sure, it’s too expensive — I remember a similar convo happening years ago with Irish blogs vs IMRO (Irish PRS).

Was more thinking ahead, a possible new model for radio-like functionality, that could opt into paying artists that way.

Compilation News! CALL FOR SONGS!

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?

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

Possibly a daft question, but in the sense that Fedi broadcasts would be registrable with PROs?

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

I feel strongly that artists should NOT have to use social media, for their work to be seen and heard.

Even apps like Mastodon have inherited “dark patterns” from the likes of Twitter and Instagram. This is via technological design (eg, follower/following model, engagement stats), or socially (eg, ragebaiting or influencer behaviour).

So what’s the alternative?

I think those of us who can still actually enjoy social media should be consciously creating “megaphones”: sharing artists’ work to large networks of people. At the moment, ironically, this probably looks like building the following of a social media account!

Examples of this, past and present:

• Radio Free Fedi
• NHAM
• In general, music radio and TV

Then, while under capitalism, we also have to think about how the artist can be compensated for their work. Radio and TV have dealt with this with payments to performing & mechanical and rights societies, and publishers/publishing collection agencies. This is then distributed to the songwriters and performers whose works are played.

Should we be thinking about getting funding for a Fedi broadcasting license?

Freeing artists from addictive social media: Fedi broadcast idea

I feel strongly that artists should NOT have to use social media, for their work to be seen and heard.

Even apps like Mastodon have inherited “dark patterns” from the likes of Twitter and Instagram. This is via technological design (eg, follower/following model, engagement stats), or socially (eg, ragebaiting or influencer behaviour).

So what’s the alternative?

I think those of us who can still actually enjoy social media should be consciously creating “megaphones”: sharing artists’ work to large networks of people. At the moment, ironically, this probably looks like building the following of a social media account!

Examples of this, past and present:

• Radio Free Fedi
• NHAM
• In general, music radio and TV

Then, while under capitalism, we also have to think about how the artist can be compensated for their work. Radio and TV have dealt with this with payments to performing & mechanical and rights societies, and publishers/publishing collection agencies. This is then distributed to the songwriters and performers whose works are played.

Should we be thinking about getting funding for a Fedi broadcasting license?

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Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

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.

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

Really important point!!! Of course as @timglorioso says there are other perspectives as well, and those are important too, but very often in fora like this there’s a self-selecting sample of people who are (a) really interested in music and (b) have time to invest (otherwise we wouldn’t be posting here!) so as a result there are a lot fewer “casual users” than in the rest of the world.

And great thread in general, including the tension between “frictionless” as on the one hand something that people want but also what corporate platforms use to get people stuck.

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

Protocols not platforms It’s certainly worth reading; it’s the foundational text of Bluesky (Dorsey, who was Twitter CEO at the time, initially decided to fund what turned into Bluesky after reading the article, and its author Mike Masnick is now on their board) and Nostr.

Agreed that it very much comes from a “markets FTW” philosophy (Masnick is a libertarian) and glosses over the problems with that approach. Bluesky’s moderation services (aka labelers) are a direct implementation of the “marketplace of filters” described in the article, and as markets go it’s neither free (Bluesky can delete other moderation services) nor fair (everybody using Bluesky’s client has to use Bluesky’s moderation service, and there’s no good mechanism for discovering other moderation services so almost nobody runs them).

Also, it’s very much based in a view of “free speech” that’s much more common in the US than elsewhere. A good example of this is the discussion of how one of the advantages of the approach is that Alex Jones (a fascist conspiracy theorist) can still reach his audience. Is that a good thing? It is if you’re a libertarian!

I also see no real indication of platforms moving away from being hugely centralized, and don’t think there has been movement on this since the author wrote this article in 2019 (which also counts as a caveat on the article itself).

It’s certainly true that existing platforms haven’t moved in that direction at all (with the minor exception of Meta’s handwavy gestures towards Threads Fediverse interoperability, which at least so far have basically been a PR play), but I wouldn’t view that as an indictment of the article. That focus was (IMHO) basically a funding pitch, including the bit about how “Users placed tremendous pressure on platforms to cut him [Alex Jones] off.” And it worked! Dorsey (who has said that he regrets banning fascists and anti-trans bigots from his platform) saw this as a way around the pressures on that platform company CEOs. Which is nonsense of course (Bluesky gets plenty of heat for not banning anti-trans bigots) but it’s exactly the kind of nonsense that would be appealing to Dorsey.

Finally it’s worth highlighting that Masnick’s anti-regulation think tank Copia Institute gets funding from Google and other tech companies. They also do some good work, for example the Moderator Mayhem content moderation game … and Masnick (like many libertarians) is very good on civil liberties in general. Still, they are who they are.

How platforms dominate and enshittify

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;

And @timglorioso replied;

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.

How platforms dominate and enshittify

Does this count? Spotify Removing Artists' Music for Streaming Fraud They Didn't Commit

Was talking about it earlier with @Mel and Ebauche.

How platforms dominate and enshittify

Continuing the side discussion on platform dominance from Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump, where @timglorioso said:

How platforms dominate and enshittify

Continuing the side discussion on platform dominance from Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump, where @timglorioso said:

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Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

Yeah, this is my thought on it. I love the app idea, but get annoyed with being connected to the online world too much - and where I live doesn’t exactly have loads of record shops and venues to opt into something like this (the ones that do exist are slightly spread out). Made me wonder if there’s a meeting point between both - as in, if I don’t pick up my phone for an hour, it unlocks a track, or if I walk 100 steps, does it show something cool? It could even be something as simple as sharing something unlocks part of a larger musical puzzle and builds community that way. Maybe there’s a meeting point between the intentionality and conscious listening and blended online/offline discovery?

And with the federated concern, I think we’re all burnt out from what we’ve been offered previously and whilst it’s right to be skeptical of it solving every musician’s problems, it’s probably the most exciting option to me right now because it’s giving a bit more autonomy in terms of being able to take my profile with me somewhere else in the Fediverse if needs change and it’s a welcome tonal shift from being an algo and ads slot machine (like Facebook, where I could pay to access my own audience and still not feel that I have any real transparency in the results). I agree that it needs careful consideration though to not turn into more of the same and be privacy respecting if using location-based info (as Loki rightly pointed out in a conversation about it via Mirlo).

Anyway, these are all really interesting ideas from all corners! Also sent the dev of freq.social an invite but they’re taking a well-earned break over the summer - fingers crossed they’ll join in at some point and add to this. It’d be interesting to get Glenn McDonald involved too (mentioned this before here), but not sure how yet.

Compilation News! CALL FOR SONGS!

Call for Songs:

“The Weapon and the Shield”

A Protest Music Compilation

I am curating a compilation titled “The Weapon and the Shield,” celebrating music as a force of resistance and protection. I am inviting artists to submit original songs that speak truth, stir emotion, and stand firm. Whether your sound is rooted in folk, hip hop, punk, soul, or experimental or anything in between.

I welcome music that challenges injustice, defends the vulnerable, and amplifies unheard voices.

The title is inspired by Fela Kuti’s philosophy, “Music is the weapon.” I chose it to reflect both the power to confront and the strength to shield. I believe music can both fight oppression and inspire hope.

Here are the submission details.

Deadline: 30 September
Format: WAV or high-quality MP3
Length: Ideally under six minutes Include: Artist bio, track information, lyrics, and a short explanation of why the song belongs in this compilation

I welcome submissions from anyone whose music embodies protest. You do not have to respond to any one issue.
If your sound carries the spirit of resistance, I want to hear it.

Please send your submission to kiffiethedreamer@gmail.com
Use the subject line: Weapon and Shield Submission followed by your artist name

Good luck!

Kiffie

PS please share this everywhere and tag me so I can help reshare it too! Let’s make this huge!!

Compilation News! CALL FOR SONGS!

Call for Songs:

“The Weapon and the Shield”

A Protest Music Compilation

I am curating a compilation titled “The Weapon and the Shield,” celebrating music as a force of resistance and protection. I am inviting artists to submit original songs that speak truth, stir emotion, and stand firm. Whether your sound is rooted in folk, hip hop, punk, soul, or experimental or anything in between.

I welcome music that challenges injustice, defends the vulnerable, and amplifies unheard voices.

The title is inspired by Fela Kuti’s philosophy, “Music is the weapon.” I chose it to reflect both the power to confront and the strength to shield. I believe music can both fight oppression and inspire hope.

Here are the submission details.

Deadline: 30 September
Format: WAV or high-quality MP3
Length: Ideally under six minutes Include: Artist bio, track information, lyrics, and a short explanation of why the song belongs in this compilation

I welcome submissions from anyone whose music embodies protest. You do not have to respond to any one issue.
If your sound carries the spirit of resistance, I want to hear it.

Please send your submission to kiffiethedreamer@gmail.com
Use the subject line: Weapon and Shield Submission followed by your artist name

Good luck!

Kiffie

PS please share this everywhere and tag me so I can help reshare it too! Let’s make this huge!!

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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. We knowingly and unknowingly choose stuff that’s bad for us in daily life. Like when I want a cookie. I eat the cookie and it tastes good, even though I know it’s bad for me. If I eat a dozen cookies everyday, I acknowledge that my health may be negatively impacted. In terms of culture and community, choices are more complex and their potential effects are harder to foresee.

Feed or not, what I’m trying to do is shed light on the choices in front of us and get us thinking about why we might or might not want them. And you’re right, it doesn’t have to be either/or.

Great idea. As a federation noob, I have some questions. Is there a separate website for searching or could you search across servers from any place that supports federation? Do servers manually declare which servers they can search? I don’t use Mastodon, curious how it works there.

Who is missing? Who should we invite?

I thought of student radio but just no idea anymore of where to start looking for people to invite. It would be very cool though.

Who is missing? Who should we invite?

Good idea @Roberta. I’m thinking maybe some people from student radio, community access radio too, and guard-band FM too? They all include music programming run by people who love sharing music.

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

Oh and …

The publications you regularly read are a recommendation feed. I think what you’re really criticising here is the nudging machine that all the big platforms have enshittified into. I don’t think anyone is advocating decentralised search plumbing that works like that.

Maybe let’s turn the discussion in a more fun direction by getting into the weeds of what kind of federated search we do have in mind. I’ve laid out my ideas and talked a fair bit here, so I’m going to shut up for a while and see what the discussion so far brings up for others : )

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. It’s now cliché to point out that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. But I’ve seen it happen.

All that said, it doesn’t have to be an either/or.

I think you’re right about the first part, because it already exists in the form of FunkWhale and BandWagon. In fact the whole fediverse and AP happened to some degree because Matt and co wanted to federate GNU FM (and Christine and co wanted to federate GNU MediaGoblin). There’s clearly a demand for this, and has been some time.

But I’m open to other suggestions, and I’d love to see other experiments being run in parallel. What could this community add to awareness days like NetLabel day, or events along the lines of the FediVision Song Contest and CC Music Awards? Or Record Store Day, which my random idea about geogating releases could tie in with for example.

These are conversations that probably need their own topic, but they’re definitely worth having.

TSMN monthly stats

Very curious lol

Because of a funny aspect of our hosting, api.mirlo.space just loads our front-end, so it’s entirely possible that someone lands on our site and just navigates it on that bit of subdomain real estate without realizing they’re doing that. That’s probably something we should fix. But mainly I’m wondering where people find that link, our e-mail newsletters don’t do any redirecting, so I don’t think it’d be there, so much show that it would link primarily from there and not from the other domain? Does the traffic sources not provide any more precise insight? I know we’ve linked to here in one blog post.

Who is missing? Who should we invite?

Does anyone take part in Cities and Memory?

They recently did a survey and I mentioned this place. Think it would be cool to get Stuart (curator of the project) here.

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

This entire website is for just music

Thanks for the perspective. Personally, I tend to listen to music actively (not as background) and discover through journalism and community such as Hearing Things. And I’m content to write on a piece of paper whether I want to dig deeper or buy a physical copy. A recommendation feed is of no interest to me.

I suggest that we do this by our own volition rather than with protocol plumbing. I’m skeptical that programmatically linking discoverability systems is better than getting to know one another and establishing relationships. The challenge then is initial exposure. I find gossip (e.g. friends of friends) to be a more organic starting point in our designs. Even technology like radio broadcast is best-case curated by humans, despite the limited relationship between curator and listener.

@strypey I’ll check out your random idea. I appreciated the IMC essay you linked in your introduction post, and enjoyed reading some of your reflections on Indymedia. I’m guilty of some soft waldenponding, but my hope is that anyone might help bend the arc of our relationship with computers rather than accept its trajectory as inevitable.

All this said, an ActivityPub-based aggregator does feel inevitable at this point. I’m not convinced it’s as good for music and musicians as it seems.

Who is missing? Who should we invite?

I took a lot of liberties. Added sections for netlabels, and Survivors Of for sinking or sunk projects whose organiser might be looking for a lifeboat. Also a section at the top to list who’s already here, so newbies don’t keep adding them I’ve added a bunch of projects and people I’ve come across over the years through my CC and fediverse evangelism, and my podcast addiction. A bunch of music platforms, a few music podcasters, etc.

EDIT: Do we need some way of marking who’s been invited, and who still needs an invite?

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

I appreciate the out-of-the-box thinking. Seem like you might appreciate my random idea for an in-person media store app.

And sure, if a musician wants to go waldenponding, and opt out of putting their music online, that’s their business. If they only make their tunes available on 8-track reel-to-reel at the one surviving record shop in their town, or make a single copy on vinyl and bury it in a time capsule, that’s an artistic statement in itself.

But most musicians, especially those who want to make a bit of coin out of their creative work, are interested in being discoverable. That’s why record shops and music venues exist, instead of bands waiting in their garages for passers-by to stumble upon them.

Now I take your point, in that any federated search ought to be opt-out. Or even opt-in, depending on the participating service. If a musician wants to set up a FairCamp site and make it undiscoverable on our hypothetical artist-centric search federation, again, that’s their business. But …

And how do most people search that one place? Goggle, and other centralised, DataFarming general-purpose search gatekeepers. And if robots.txt is used to exclude that unfederated FairCamp site from those too, how is anyone going to find it? I mean, sure, they could put the web address on their merch, or a QR code pointing to it on their posters, but that means the only visitors to their website are people who have already discovered them.

Worth keeping in mind too that it’s a lot easy to be discovered by serendipity if you live in a big city than a small town. For the same reason it’s easier to meet a suitable person to ask on a date if you live in a big city.

Here’s hoping But I think what @icaria36 and I are driving at is that because of network effects, there’s always tends to be an “everything place” portal for each thing people want to do online. YouTub for video. GritHub for code. BandCamp for music sales.

It seems like the only way to avoid everyone being herded into one big place, controlled by corporate DataFarmers, is to interconnect many smaller places. The most fundamental piece of glue that makes many places into one place, is federated search, that can find our work regardless of where we choose to host it, accessible from whichever app we use to look for it.

OpenVerse is great, as is search.creativecommons.org, and a number of other CC search portals, including LibreFM and open.audio for music. These could all be linked into the federated search system, selecting only those results that are marked as being under CC licenses. Other music discovery sites like Discogs and MusicBrainz, Hype Machine and Libre.fm, could both feed into and get results from the federated search if they chose, regardless of license.

The fundamental idea here is not to create a new music search portal, but to use protocol plumbing to link as many existing discoverability systems as possible together. So they work better for both artists and audiences.

Radio Free Fedi Fest

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

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

I’d say Spotify could end up being less and less the “everything” place. A lot of artists are pulling their stuff over the “Daniel Ek, AI Warmonger Scumbag Startup” thing.

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

(sorry about the deleted post folks, for some reason Discourse decided this was a reply to Simon instead of @timglorioso )

IIRR they also publish over RSS and ActivityPub, and by now probably ATProto and Nostr. I really like the way this gets us back to the original concept of the web; publish it where you want, and anyone can find it how they want.

I know that protocol implementation is a big job, but I highly recommend that all music hosting platforms make this a medium-to-long term goal. One thing I’d suggest what Jaywink did in Python with the federation module for SocialHome, making it self-contained enough to be reusable by other Python software. And modular enough that any dev using it in their software can add support for this or that protocol as plugins to the module, and make it available to every project using the module.

It demonstrates the usefulness of a vendor-neutral payments protocol. But BlockChains are not the only way to do that, nor necessarily the best, and proposing a payment protocol as the solution to debanking is a classic example of trying to fix a social problem with a technical solution.

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

We are talking about discovering… music. Very important for those who like to discover new music but… just music in the end. Maybe professional DJs, labels, and dedicated hobbyists can find the time and the patience to make discovering music their main activity. As of me, I listen to new music mostly when I’m doing routine house tasks. I listen hands free, and when I like something, I’ll look who is this, like, maybe follow – actions that will fine tune my feed.

I’m doing this on Soundcloud because the features are there, and the big community / source of music makers is there too. In the end, for 90% of artists on Soundcloud their mindset is not that different than on the Fediverse or here.

I’m looking forward to switch to a TSMN-friendly alternative, but it needs to be hands-free with likes and follows or equivalent. I won’t stop house work because discovering new free/social music requires my focused attention and my hands.

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

I’m cautious about qualities like “sticky” and “frictionless” as they are what corporate platforms use to get us, well, stuck. The tools we make might instead be useful and complementary. We might provide a “step down” from the slick experiences corporate platforms hooked us on. Ask what would happen if we excluded a feature, or if we included it, how it might impact community and culture. For example, the expectation of seeing everything from one place. Spotify already does this. What would that future look like for federation? What behaviors might result? Would we end up with another capitalist-inspired algorithmic battleground? I don’t have the answers, but in my opinion the Web as the “one place” gets us far enough. I’m betting on people to organize and collaborate in ways that limit competition (some analogy about sizes of ponds and fishes) and deepen connection.

Somewhat-relevant story time. I go to this chain of franchise media stores called The Exchange to get DVDs and video games. A couple times now I’ve ended up ordering something they didn’t have at the location I visited. It’s kinda like a library network, where you can get something from another branch sent to yours. When I’ve ordered something, it feels like cheating. It takes the fun out of finding an physical copy of an album or movie. I think there’s a parallel here with finding something at an indie web shop versus through a portal to all the federated things. I got what I wanted, at the cost of turning it into another mindless transaction. But did I really get what I wanted? Wouldn’t it be better to strike up a relationship with an independent store owner in my community instead of using a detached provider of anything I desire? Sometimes friction seems like the better option.

Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

When I think of protocols and free speech, I think of something like Distributed Press making websites available over ipfs:// and hyper:// in addition to http://. They recently made this censorship-resistant donation tool to avoid platform takedowns and payment issues. They link this article about debanking to demonstrate the need for cryptocurrency.

Roberta Fidora - The Art of Electronic Music and Animation

Showing off the props department, mainly.

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

Yeah, that doesn’t work for most of us. I still wonder how hard it is for the current social platforms (or someone else) to offer a tweakable feed like Soundcloud or Bandcamp, based on artists, tags, other users followed. I don’t know you, but these feeds are my primary source for discovering and following new artists.

1+ hour mixes a bit, too, but starting to listen to one is quite a commitment and also many don’t have the list of tracks mixed, and even when they have, it’s not easy to find the track I want to identify, the artist might not be in the platform and I can’t follow them anyway…

Social music feeds are imho the way to go.

Roberta Fidora - The Art of Electronic Music and Animation

An episode featuring @Roberta!

Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

I’ve advocated for a sevice like https://openverse.org which already has an audio search expand to do music searches.

Random idea for an in-person media store app

Wow, I’d never heard of Soundtrckr! Along similar lines, FreeSound have a music map on their site;

Goes to show that (as with so many things) most of the technical plumbing for location-aware music services has existed for more than a decade. The challenge is to design a satisfying UX, and get enough buy-in from artists and intermediaries to make the business logistics work.

But although I wrote the original concept sketch as an idea for a whole service, it could also be an optional feature. Made available to artists using existing services like @bandwagon or Mirlo.

Imagine, for example, you drop a pre-release of your new album on a hosting service. But can only be accessed on your device when you’re at your local ‘music hub’. Or you stream a live-to-air where you play the whole album live. But the stream can only be accessed during listening parties at the music hub.

Again, the music hub (music embassy?) could be a record shop, live venue, public library, etc. But the idea is that there’s one at a time per neighborhood, so it creates opportunities for community building through shared musical interests.

In the context of what Ben, @simon and others are doing with the ‘musicverse’ (so to speak), Evan P has done some experiments with geolocating ActivityPub data (see places.pub), which could maybe be adapted to location-aware music hosting features.

Random idea for an in-person media store app

Also found this from 2009 - there’s a few from around that time: Soundtrckr Is Spot-On, Like a Location-Aware Pandora | WIRED

Particularly interesting for the quote:

Adding location awareness to social music streaming, already a rare strong suit for music startups, will make them even more potent by giving listeners another efficient way to discover music – and each other. And this time around, it matters where you are.

Notice that someone started an app called MySoundtrack! a few years ago too and mentioned it on Reddit, which allowed people to tag locations with their own music but not to discover something new in a real world location.

Random idea for an in-person media store app

This is a fantastic idea!!

Roberta Fidora - The Art of Electronic Music and Animation

In this episode of Lorenzo's Music Podcast, I meet Roberta Fidora, an eclectic electronic musician, animator, and occasional puppeteer. Roberta began playing music at an early age with an unexpected detour from saxophone lessons to electronic organ classes. We discuss her unique blend of music and animation, exploring how she intertwines these art forms to create visual music experiences.

We discuss her evolution as an artist, from her time in the post-punk scene to her current solo work. Roberta reveals the creative process behind her latest projects, including her use of puppetry and animation in music videos, and how she builds her songs around visual concepts.

For more on Roberta's music and to explore her videos, visit https://robertafidora.com

---

Lorenzo's Music Website - https://www.lorenzosmusic.com

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Just released: double time compilation by Mirlo

Our second compilation album, which acts as a fundraiser for Mirlo, is out now!

Listen and buy it here: https://mirlo.space/team/release/double-time

Earlier this year, Mirlo put out a call for submissions from musicians to support us in pulling together another compilation album. We were overwhelmed by the amount of submissions and it was very difficult to pick the songs for the album. There was enough to make a compilation album several times over, and we likely will in the future! 🎵🐦‍⬛

The music is all great, and we encourage you to check out each artist listed.

Features update

Catalog price: one of our most requested features is for artists to set a catalog price. We've now implemented that! Artists can set a price on their catalog on their release management page, and then supporters can buy the entire catalog, which will give them digital access to all their music. You can now buy both of Mirlo's compilation albums in one click.

Merch features: we've polished up a lot of our Merch functionality. Artists now have more control over their Merch, things look slightly better, and customers can contact artists about the status of their Merch if needed. Check out these beautiful co-op designed and union printed t-shirts and hats.

Navigation and discovery improvements: we've made it so that our front page now properly grabs random albums released in the past few months, as well as things that were recently bought on the platform! Artists can now be navigated alphabetically, and in list view if you prefer.

General improvements: we've improved the resilience of track processing when artists upload music, people can now leave little messages to artists when they buy something, we've made some massive accessibility improvements, language improvements, and are just generally fixing the UI all over the place.

And that's just in the past week!

Some things to look forward to: we're building out our "sales" page, which will let users see all sales they've made on the platform. We're also still working on label functionality, and if you're interested in trialing that, please let us know. Finally, we're internally testing a mobile app and it's starting to look pretty cool.

Buy double time to support our work

If you aren't already, support us with a monthly contribution!

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Random idea for an in-person media store app

I found this brief concept sketch in my notebook today. It’s a quirky idea and may not be practical. But done right, it could be a fun gimmick, and a way of drawing people back into in-person musical community.

Imagine a BandCamp-style app/ website that only plays music when you’re in a physical store. The store could be a record shop, a music venue, a hipster cafe, even a public library; any environment where people can sit around listening to music, or thinking about whether to buy it. It would bring people together in physical space, connecting us with each other, and potentially with the local music scene.

Being able to listen to music before you buy is a longstanding tradition. In the 1990s, record shops usually had ‘listening posts’. Where we would either listen to songs from a range of albums curated by the staff, and changed up regularly, or choose an album from the racks to listen to. As music sales went online, sites like BandCamp replicated this by allowing us to listen from home, and as mobile internet proliferated, from anywhere. But it also allowed us to do something shop-based listening didn’t; listen to the music as if we’d bought a copy.

This created a situation where the online stores with deep enough pockets to be the world’s unpaid jukebox (eg BandCamp, YouTub), came to dominate online music sales. If people can search, listen and buy with all the convenience of a BandCamp, but only at a specific physical places(s), except for music they’ve paid for, it might make purchases much more likely. It could also make browsing and buying music a much more social experience.

The infrastructure could look like one app, connected to one set of servers, that can be used in a range of participating locations; record shops, live music venues, hipster cafes, even public libraries. Revenue sharing could be worked out between musicians and their crews, the businesses hosting the participating store locations, and the app coding and server hosting teams. The whole thing could be structured as a multi-stakeholder platform cooperative.

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Top of TSMN June 2025

This is Top of The Social Music Network June 2025, the top 20 posts on the.socialmusic.network created between April 1st and June 30.

1. Interest in organizing a “FediMusicForum”?
2. Is Every Pop Star A Policy Failure?
3. What is fair?
4. Public Playlists by Mirlo
5. Promotion strategies
6. Soundcloud’s social features
7. Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump
8. When Will Mirlo Version 1 be Complete? by Mirlo
9. FediMusicForum objectives
10. The app store percentage problem
11. Testing Federation with We Distribute
12. Support Club Sites/Options
13. Stevenray music
14. First month of The Social Music Network!
15. Current Fediverse resources for Musicians
16. Schall und Stille – Sanctuary
17. Welcome Monarkie as TSMN moderator!
18. Soundgas Makes Mysterious Announcement
19. Using this grant to set up a Mirlo company in Europe
20. RSS for music makers

How does it work?

TopOfTSMN listings show what our community has been interested about lately. They are based on Top, a very basic algorithm that counts visits, s, and comments.

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Public Playlists by Mirlo

Last week, Bandcamp released a new feature that has been anticipated for a long time: publicly sharable playlists. We still listen to a lot of our music on Bandcamp, so it's exciting so see such a useful feature that listeners there have been asking about for years finally available. But we also understand why it's been such a long time coming: like many problems facing online music software, the issues are not technical but social and legal ones.

The ability to play music as streams on Bandcamp hinges entirely on sidestepping the complex royalty systems that govern streaming platforms. As best as we understand, by limiting streams to "preview listens" of purchased music, they’ve long avoided paying performance royalties to PROs (Performance Rights Organizations) like ASCAP, BMI, or PRS. The new playlist feature—restricted to music you’ve bought—is a carefully calculated move. Once music appears in user-generated playlists, it risks being classified as a "diffusion channel," which could trigger PRO licensing requirements. Bandcamp’s legal team has likely scrutinized this to ensure they don’t cross the line; instead, they are dancing nimbly on the edge of a loophole.

The distinction between "promotional listens" and curated playlists is legally murky. PROs treat playlists as potential "compilation albums," meaning the music’s context shifts from artist intent to third-party curation. By mirroring Funkwhale's approach—where users share digital music they own—Bandcamp uses a gray area that might shield them from PRO battles. And of course, encouraging fans to build and share mix tapes of music they've bought is a clever way of encouraging music sales while keeping fans in the Bandcamp ecosystem, rather than using existing third party Bandcamp playlists like bndcmpr.co.

Of course, as a group of people building something that's currently positions itself as a competitor to Bandcamp, and with our stab at public playlists released last week, we were also a bit surprised. This is the first major feature that Bandcamp has released since its purchase by Songtradr after what feels like a year of rewriting their terms and conditions. Before this release, we shared the sentiment of many that while Bandcamp currently works pretty great for musicians, they had also become stagnant. We'll see if these new feature releases will continue.

In the meantime, we can celebrate some of the things we've been working on ourselves.

We've also rolled out our own iteration on public playlists—we hope that people will take advantage of building narrative blog posts around them. Now, you can add songs to a blog post and it will all be playable on the blog post page itself. You can try it out on the this blog post's own page!

At the end of May we helped organize an event in DC that brought together musicians and the solidarity economy. The folks at KiaZii did most of the heavy lifting and the event itself was a blast, regenerative and a mini-verse of the world we'd like to see. We're really excited about doing more work with them in the future.

We've also released a whole host of new features over the past few months, from adding tracks to your list of favorites and purchasing them, the ability to upload music without letting people download it, tour dates, to the ability to set your own platform cut on subscriptions. Lastly, we are focusing our current development on label features and looking for a few brave souls to test them out. If you or your label want to participate, e-mail us at hi@mirlo.space.

Have thoughts? Join the discussion on the Social Music Network.

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Subjam crowdfund ends June 13!

Hey all, was invited here by Simon of Mirlo! Wanted to share my LOCAL music streaming startup and its crowdfund that ends in just a few days! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/subjam-a-live-and-local-music-streaming-network/

From our website:

Subjam is a new LOCAL MUSIC STREAMING NETWORK. We’re taking a brand new approach to music discovery on your phone with exciting features like live broadcasting, social networking and a LOCAL focus.

We believe in open media, open source software, independent and DIY music culture.

Our mobile app will offer the following features:

• LIVE broadcasting and recording of audio streams
• Creating and joining “Scenes” (groups based on location + musical genre)
• Subscribing to and interacting with users, events and promotions

Our mission is to support the four pillars of a music scene:

• Artists
• Music Fans
• Venues
• Supporting Businesses

We’ve got a few days left in our crowdfund. Every dollar we get, regardless of if we meet our goal, will go toward completing the goals outlined. Please consider contributing. Speaking with Simon made me super confident that there are GOOD people out there trying to do GOOD things for independent artists. I hope to collab with Mirlo in the future to create a much more equitable global ecosystem for all, ESPECIALLY artists and other creatives.

Jordan

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Discoverability on the Fediverse and Thought Dump

Not sure how best to approach this really but I was thinking about discoverability on the Fediverse and taking notice of a lot of the streaming articles coming out of late (plus Liz Pelly’s book). At the same time, I’m also seeing interesting visual platforms popping up like https://www.soot.com and https://rooms.xyz (both backed by private investors though ) and wondering about what it would take to pull people away from streaming, if knowing “it’s bad” isn’t enough. It sort of reminded me of things I liked about the early internet and sites with clickable Flash-based comics and online places such as BowieNet. So, without this turning into a Grandpa Simpson-style ramble, I feel like there needs to be a site that takes the best of the links below and makes a strong, fun visual space where musicians can be found randomly, either by something like location, or by creating clusters of artists or maps of listener recommendations. Mirlo have just started testing out linking musicians to labels (without it being a paid feature like Bandcamp) and I think that’s a really exciting start plus the Fediwall from Indie Beat and @limebar is also really cool (in the last day there is also a live app hoping to launch called Subjam which is aiming to link to music venues and their communities) and I was curious if there’s a way of building on that and even linking a few different ideas together? Here’s a few examples of things that are/were slightly more offbeat ways of discovering things (aside from the aforementioned Soot and Rooms):

• Ghostly’s now defunct app, where you could select from their catalogue based on “Mood” (but it was actually a colour wheel, because I downloaded it at the time).
• This genre map where you can click around then it gives examples in a playlist.
• Every Noise at Once (although I appreciate we don’t necessarily want to fall under genres pushed as part of an end of year ad campaign cough cough Spotify Wrapped).
• Radio Garden - imagine this but with musicians and showing lines that indicate links between them. It’s slightly infuriating that you can collaborate with your friends across your projects but on streaming, your musical projects aren’t shown as being related in any way. It’d be a neat way of visualising that context and encouraging people to discover how different people are interconnected (“interdependent”).
• A Number from the Ghost is one person’s site but what if there was something showing fedi musicians videos in this kind of way? Or as floating images in a “constellation” (to use @Alex’s terminology) that are scattered around and clickable.

Obviously some are more complex or resource-intensive than others, but it seems like there might be some weirder ideas that could help people get found in the same way you might stumble into a record shop and find something bizarre? It’s hard to articulate, so I’m going to end the post here and let other people chime in.

Edited to add in Emma Warren’s book, which might also have started some of this.

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Is Submithub a scam?

Any of you have any positive experiences of Submithub? The idea of paying money to submit music to “influencers” seems pretty scammy to me.

Is there any PR tools that are usueful for indie artists besides trusty old promo emails?

6 posts - 6 participants

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Reflection Thread on What Makes FediForum a Success

Curious to hear what people think has made FediForum a success in the past, what they would like to change, etc. We’ve seen some answers along those lines, but it would be good to get more concrete thoughts so that we can inform how we organize the FediMusicForum (keeping in mind that we can’t be everything to everyone).

7 posts - 5 participants

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FediMusicForum objectives

The FediMusicForum basic objectives we have so far, based on Interest in organizing a "FediMusicForum"? - #7 by simon

Ideally, it’s a little bit this space, but synchronously.

• Bringing people working on same projects together into a space (virtual or in person, imo) to get to know each other, build community, and camraderie
• Get introduced to new projects, learn what they’re doing, and how they operate
• Maybe start spitballing on standards, learn about what already exists
• Ground on why we’re doing this work, political education

Is this good enough?

13 posts - 7 participants

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When Will Mirlo Version 1 be Complete? by Mirlo

We’ve been thinking about what it means to set parameters around our work, and what it means for a product to be complete. Mirlo has always been a bit of an experiment to see how far we can get with what we have and it turns out we can get pretty far! Taking stock of what we think a digital music distribution software can and should be able to do will help us know when it’s time to reflect, take stock, and see what makes the most sense to work on.

Below is this list. Adding a disclaimer that just because it’s implemented in Mirlo, it doesn’t mean that the UX is ideal or bug free! We’ll continue tweaking things and responding to feedback.

For artists:

For labels (all the artist features plus):

For supporters:

Technical features:

Doing this work helps us set the scope of what it is Mirlo will do, and how best we can support that work going forward. We’ve been thinking a lot about ecosystem building, and we think it makes the most sense for Mirlo to be good at a specific set of tasks, and to build other things on top of Mirlo’s (existent) API if that’s desired.

Things that could be built on top of Mirlo as it currently exists:

• Mobile apps to listen to your own collection

• A simple Soundcloud clone (you would need to implement some form of comment tracking).

• A digital streaming service that uses a user-centered model to control payouts.

• Integrating Mirlo into faircamp or other services like it.

And so much more! People have been brainstorming projects like this on the Social Music Network. Pitch in!

12 posts - 7 participants

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Is Every Pop Star A Policy Failure?

Hey everyone, just had this thought as I was cleaning the kitchen and thought it would be interesting to hear people’s thoughts. There’s a catchy slogan, “Every Billionaire is a Policy Failure”, that nicely sums up an analysis of what’s wrong with the world right now as it relates to extreme wealth inequality. It points to the fact that for billionaires to exist, people need to create policies and cultural frameworks to make that possible. It got me thinking about this in the music world—are those policy failures at the heart of the extreme inequality in how music circulates in the streaming era? Or, put another way: in the future we are trying to build, do pop stars exist or have they been replaced by something else (pop constellations, perhaps)?

19 posts - 6 participants

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What is fair?

Hey all,

I have to admit I have thought about this a long time and didn’t know how to tackle it… and now I finally have been able to sit down and put my thoughts to words.

A little post about what is fair and how it would be possible to introduce fairness into the process of discovering new music.

Have a look, if you like. I’d be interested what you think.

What is fair?

19 posts - 8 participants

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Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

Just sharing this longread that I think will be interesting to folks here

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Support Club Sites/Options

Not sure if the right sort of question for here, but for folks that have a Patreon (or run something Patreon-like), is there somewhere I should be looking that offers folks the choice of joining yearly and integrates nicely with your own website? I use Bandzoogle for my site and they only let you run a club as monthly, so I have a very convoluted workaround to join, which looks confusing, plus an option to join yearly via Bandcamp (which has limited functionality and involves me sending a link to login to my website as well). It’s a bit of a jumble. Patreon have messed around with fees, by all accounts, Ghost won’t let you set yearly as the only option, other site builders aren’t well-equipped for musician sites, Bandcamp is, well Bandcamp and everything else is kind of beyond my technical knowledge.

I ask because, I’m thinking of merging my own music into the label imprint I’m trying to get up and running with my partner (with the aim of posting more things out to people and doing zines, mixes and so on with us and a few friends) and the options are so limited when you want to run it as a yearly thing. Does anyone run theirs setup as monthly? The disadvantage there is all the extra fees, from what I’ve read.

Is this something that any Fedi folks are working on potentially? Or any suggestions for making this work better?

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Interest in organizing a "FediMusicForum"?

Would there be any interest in organizing a fedimusicforum?

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Promotion strategies

This doc aims to become an introduction to ways for artists and their music to be discovered by people out there. The goal here is to get more people aware of your music, more listeners, and more fans.

Eventually more listeners might turn into more income, but we discuss income strategies in another doc. We also don’t explain where to publish your music, which should be covered in a separate doc.

How your music is discovered

(((Just aiming to identify the areas. Each point to be developed with a short description and a dedicated page.)))

These are ways how your music may find its way without your direct intervention.

• Metadata - description, genre, bpm, hashtags, license… Make it easy for shops, search engines, social media boosters, playlist makers, curators…
• Playlists, compilations…
• (Online) music radios and podcasts

How you are discovered

But really, your music will be better discovered when you are involved as an artist or a band. When you are the one(s) being discovered.

• Website
• Social media - (a sane approach to)
• Fanbase - (clearly a page on its own)
• Closest scene(s) - being active in your local scene and/or your genre.
• Contests, campaigns, awards.
• The media
• Promotion services
• Labels

23 posts - 10 participants

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Soundcloud's social features

SoundCloud Global Limited & Co. KG is not a social enterprise but it is still (and despite everything) the platform I use by default to find new music, and it’s all because its social features:

• Follow users, artists or not.
• Like and comment songs
• Emoji-react and comment in specific points of a song
• Repost songs, with optional comment.

As a result of these ~1-click and mobile-first features, users get:

• A beautiful feed with music posted or reposted by the people you follow. Press play and let it sound, skipping to next/previous whenever you want.
• A gorgeous player visualizing the users, the comments and the emoji reactions in real-time.

All this is very engaging for listeners – also for artists. The experience is very social, and keeps me from listening more music on the Fediverse and the fair platforms. Also on Bandcamp and the spotigafam platforms.

This is an invitation to discuss how the fair and truly social platforms could offer such an experience to social music lovers. What we’ve got, what’s in progress, what we miss, and (if anything) what’s not gonna happen because [reasons].

24 posts - 11 participants

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Bandcamp Fridays. Fair Trade Music Fridays?

What is your take on Bandcamp Fridays? Should be a thing in our context? What about pushing for a more neutral and broader campaign like FediMusic Fridays? For instance, what exactly could we schedule in Events, to see these Fridays coming and coordinate / celebrate around them?

(FediMusicFriday is already a tag on Mastodon, used by only a few people as far as I can see, one of them being @AxWax.)

31 posts - 6 participants

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No English? Click here! :globe_with_meridians:

How to use this forum in your language:

AR: كيف تستخدم هذا المنتدى بلغتك:
BHS: Kako da koristite Forum na svom jeziku:
BN: আপনার ভাষায় এই ফোরামটি কীভাবে ব্যবহার করবেন:
DE: Wie du dieses Forum in deiner Sprache benutzen kannst:
ES: Cómo utilizar este foro en tu idioma:
FR: Comment utiliser ce forum dans ta langue :
HI: अपनी भाषा में इस फोरम का उपयोग कैसे करें:
ID: Bagaimana cara menggunakan Forum ini dalam bahasa Anda:
JA: このフォーラムをあなたの言語で利用するには
KO: 이 포럼을 귀하의 언어로 이용하는 방법
KY: Бул форумду өз тилиңизде кантип колдонсо болот:
PL: Jak używać tego forum w swoim języku:
PT: Como utilizar este fórum no seu idioma:
RU: Как пользоваться этим форумом на вашем языке:
ZH-HANS:如何以您的语言使用本论坛：
ZH-HANT:如何以您的語言使用本論壇：

1. Click here and select your “Interface language”.

AR: أنقر هنا واختر “Interface Language” المفضلة
BHS: Kliknite ovde i izaberite svoj jezik u meniju “Interface language”.
BN: এখানে ক্লিক করে “Interface Language”-এ আপনার ভাষা নির্বাচন করুন।
DE: Klicke hier und wähle deine Sprache unter “Interface language”.
ES: Clica aquí y selecciona tu idioma en “Interface language”.
FR: Cliquez ici et sélectionnez votre “Interface language”.
HI: यहां क्लिक करें और “Interface Language” में अपनी भाषा चुनें।
ID: Klik di sini dan pilih “Interface language”.
JA: ここをクリックしてあなたの" Interface language"を選んでください。
KO: 여기를 클릭하고 귀하의 언어를 “Interface language"에서 선택하세요.
KY: Бул жерди басыңыз жана “Interface language” дегенди тандаңыз.
PL: Kliknij tutaj i wybierz swój “Język interfejsu”.
PT: Clique aqui e selecione seu idioma em “Interface language”.
RU: Нажмите здесь и выберите свой “Interface language”.
ZH-HANS: 点击此处 并选择您的 “Interface language” （界面语言）。
ZH-HANT: 點擊此處 並選擇您的 “Interface language" （介面語言）。

2. Click the “Save Changes” button.

AR: "انقر زر “Save Changes”
BHS: Kliknite na dugme “Save Changes”.
BN:“Save Changes” বোতামে ক্লিক করুন ৷
DE: Klicke auf “Save Changes”.
ES: Guarda los cambios clicando el botón “Save Changes”.
FR: Cliquez sur le bouton “Save Changes”.
HI:“Save Changes” बटन पर क्लिक करे।
ID: Klik “Save Changes”.
JA: "Save Changes"をクリックしてください。
KO: “Save Changes” 버튼을 눌러주세요.
KY: “Save Changes” баскычын басыңыз.
PL: Kliknij przycisk “Save Changes”.
PT: Clique em “Save Changes”.
RU: Нажмите кнопку “Save Changes”.
UZ: “Save Changes” tugmasini bosing.
ZH-HANS:点击 “Save Changes”（保存变更）按钮。
ZH-HANT:點擊 “Save Changes”（儲存變更）按鈕。

3. Click the to read translated posts.

AR: لقراءة المنشورات المترجمة، انقر .
BHS: Kliknite na sličicu da biste pročitali prevedene objave.
BN: অনূদিত পোস্ট পড়তে ক্লিক করুন।
DE: Klicke auf um Beiträge übersetzt zu lesen.
ES: Clica el para leer mensajes traducidos.
FR: Cliquez le pour lire les posts traduits.
HI: अनुवादित पोस्ट पढ़ने के लिए पर क्लिक करें।
ID: Klik untuk membaca postingan yang telah diterjemahkan.
JA: をクリックして翻訳された投稿をお読みください。
KO: 를 눌러 번역된 포스트를 확인하세요
KY: Которулган текстти окуу үчүн баскычын басыңыз.
PL: Kliknij symbol , by przeczytać przetłumaczone posty.
PT: Clique em para ler as publicações traduzidas
RU: Нажмите на , чтобы прочитать переведённые сообщения.
UZ: Tarjima qilingan postlarni oʻqish uchun ni bosing.
ZH-HANS:点击 图标以阅读翻译。
ZH-HANT:點擊 圖示以閱讀翻譯。

Congratulations!

AR: تهانينا!
BHS: Čestitamo!
BN: ফোরাম ব্যবহারের জন্য প্রস্তুত।
DE: Glückwunsch!
ES: ¡Felicidades!
FR: Félicitations !
HI: फोरम तैयार है।
ID: Selamat!
JA: おめでとうございます!
KO: 축하합니다!
KY: Куттуктайбыз!
PL: Gratulacje!
PT: Parabéns!
RU: Поздравляем!
UZ: Tabriklaymiz!
ZH-HANS: 恭喜您!
ZH-HANT: 恭喜您!

Source: How to use this forum in your language - Forum how-to - Movement Strategy Forum

1 post - 1 participant

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[Canceled] FediForum unconference

Anyone joining the next FediForum unconference on April 1-2?

I registered yesterday after receiving a good recommendation from a peer in this forum. It’s not cheap but it’s not frequent either, and I haven’t been to the previous ones.

I have added a line to to the list of proposed topics:

How to build a fun & sustainable scene for musicians and music lovers

Needless to say, it has a link to The Social Music Network, and if there is enough people and interest we could discuss just this.

FediForum & transphobia

See the ongoing discussion below. This is a wiki post and you can add relevant links to this discussion.

41 posts - 5 participants

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Federating The Social Music Network

Discourse, the software that powers this forum, has an ActivityPub plugin, and we have it enabled here already.

This means that we can federate specific categories and tags of this forum with other forums. But (to me) more interestingly, we can federate with categories and tags of other ActivityPub-enabled forums (Discourse and NodeBB so far, and maybe more than forums, I’m still learning).

And this means that posts and replies with the federated category/forum will be replicated in both forums regardless of who has an account on which forum.

Therefore:

If you know of an ActivityPub-enabled forum that has (or could have) a specific category or tag that we could federate, reply here with the information.

Ongoing draft proposal

What is the point of federating?

• To spread news
• To receive feedback
• NOT to federate just to federate
• NOT to federate everything
• NOT to have an equal discussion between TSMN and Fediverse posters (because it’s technically unfeasible)

When

• TSMN project news from This place
• New docs in Knowledge base
• Cross-project news originated in Projects or General
• General questions waiting for responses
• NOT dense topics expecting a dense discussion

Limitations

• We only federate the top post, not the replies.
• If the top post is long, we only federate an excerpt.
• Federated users may/will not receive mentions or reply notifications.
• All federated posts will be public on TSMN regardless of i.e. Mastodon privacy settings.
• Reply threads might be inconsistent / connections between posts might be lost.

Moderation

We apply the same standards to federated posts and users than to local posts and users:

• Posts drifting from the original topic may be split into a new or existing topic.
• Federated posts may be reported, hidden, unlisted, or deleted.
• Federated users may be blocked temporarily or permanently.

Settings

Just for reference, these are the settings available. Don’t look at the actual values, they might have changed since we took the screenshots.

34 posts - 6 participants

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We need a logo

The current “design” is just Discourse’s default. We could have a logo, and maybe some colors.

To contribute ideas and sketches you don’t need to read the entire Customize Your Site Branding - Site Management - Discourse Meta, but some details are useful to know:

• Search the “logo” requirements on that page.
• Note that color schemas are easy to change – some technical restrictions apply.
• Note that there are a bunch of official and community themes, and also a powerful theme engine.

At the same time… it’s not a bad idea to start simple and implement visual improvements as we need them. Heavy customizations are risky, both in terms of taste and sustainability (especially community themes are more prone to break in the long run with software upgrades).Anyway, ideas and proposals welcome!

76 posts - 9 participants

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Introductions thread? Introductions thread!

As per the default welcome post,

Introduce yourself by adding your picture and information about yourself and your interests to your profile…

Yeah, sure – and wait for someone to look you up, when you don’t even have any posts!

Well, in the grand old forum tradition, I propose this thread to be for letting others know that you exist - and writing a few words on what you’re about, in a conversation-starting way.

I’ll start… actually, wait, no – you go first!

65 posts - 39 participants

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What is The Social Music Network?

Fairness and autonomy for music makers and friends

The Social Music Network is a community for projects, initiatives, and individuals, that work towards fair music distribution and discovery by considering the music artists’ work as an indispensable part of culture.

Our aim is to foster a discussion and exchange between different endeavors, open source platforms, and educational resources, that strive to contribute to the artists’ autonomy, agency, and control over direct connections with their audiences.

We want to discuss the artists’ right to be fairly and transparently compensated for their work in order to live a decent life, and how to contribute to a fair ecosystem that builds a better future for artists.

We are interested in projects and initiatives that are grounded in cooperation, transparency, open source, peer-production, decentralization and federation. We want to encourage a diverse and multilingual community of makers and thinkers that engage in civil discourse, with kindness and attention towards everyone.

In the past, we have seen platforms aiming for fair trade for music makers. However, successfully commercial attempts have consistently failed on fairness after going through acquisitions, venture capital injections, and other ways of platform decay. Now, too much power is concentrated in just a handful of monopolistic corporations. Artists need safety from further unfair exploitation of their work. We need alternatives to technofeudalism, chokepoint capitalism, and the fake bliss of consumerism.

Check What we offer and join us!

1 post - 1 participant

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