Now that Bandcamp has had huge layoffs, what about an opensource, Fediverse-friendly replacement? What can a FOSS product bring to the community and do better than Bandcamp?
- Discoverability?
- Broader selection of payments platforms? Direct transfer to avoid processors? (I’m ignorant about the processing system, plus international considerations)
- Ease of spinning up (SaaS?)
- Content deliverability (on the fly transcode from sourced FLAC or WAVs? Rich video/multi track audio?)
One thing that most reddit alumni won’t care about, but one of the nicest things about doing it decentralized is censorship resistance.
Bandcamp at some point decided that the political views of the artists on their platform are a reason to get rid of some artists.
You might not see a problem since you agree with bandcamp’s politics, but companies change their politics on a dime when it becomes useful to do so.
One problem with open source commercial sites is you’re typically going to need business partners to handle credit card transactions.
They took down tim pools music, and recently I went to buy some mp3s of a guy who opposes covid mandates and he was banned too.
Again, lots of folks might disagree with both those people, but when it comes to shit like this you are always next.
https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-bandcamp-removes-timcast-five-times-august-from-platform
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, because you’re making a ton of sense. It’s not about Tim Pool, who is a dumb incel POS. It’s about the HUGE dangers of giving a company unilateral power to ban someone based solely on speech.
What if Bandcamp’s new owners are more like Facebook? They could ban work that promotes women’s rights and abortion access, which is exactly what Facebook has done.
What if Bandcamp’s new owners (or the owners after them) are more like Twitter? They could ban antifascist activists or journalists.
It truly doesn’t matter how you feel about one person. It matters how you feel about principles.
Dim Tool makes music? That’s hilarious. Anyway I don’t have a problem with platforms removing COVID misinformation.
Wait, hear me out. Direct buy from artists using crypto. Then you don’t have to deal with payment processors.
Cryptoscam shill is shilling the cryptoscam.
It’s amazing to me that anybody considers crypto"currency" to be a viable currency these days after all the failures of the (… uh … you know that “exchanges” are payment processors right? RIGHT!? …) ecosystem to the tune of now billions of dollars.
But hey, you can at least send your funny money on a public ledger (for PRIVACY! LOL!) and have it get processed painfully slowly while contributing to more greenhouse gases than most medium-sized nations!
There’s literally no downside!
You don’t need to use an exchange to get paid in crypto or use a crypto with a pubic ledger
Monero is far more private than letting a credit card processor have your information. Ethereum doesn’t use mining anymore so the electricity used for it is less than paying with credit card. It also takes a few seconds to process.
So, let’s look over the first of your favourite funny money Ponzi schemes: Monero.
Is this the Monero that people are increasingly certain is doing the digital equivalent of printing currency? (C.f. “Monerun” for details.) The Monero that has a single mining pool that’s within striking distance of pulling off a 50%+1 attack? That Monero? 'Cause that “privacy” you tout for it works both ways. Yes, user details are private … but so are the operator’s details so there’s no way of knowing what’s really going on under the covers. Like, I don’t know, say, “paper Monero”…
Doesn’t even sound slightly scammy. Not in the slightest. I know I’d trust them with monetary matters!
And now let’s address your second favourite crypto-Ponzi: Ethereum. This would be the Ethereum whose “smart” contracts are so fucking dumb that it’s almost routine to find stories of them being owned by kiddies? (Ask Hope Lend, Fantom Foundation, Balancer, Huobi, Remitano, and a cast of thousands.) Or would this be the Ethereum that filled to the brim with suspect entities like TrueUSD/$TEURO (which they laughably claim aren’t related despite both coming from the same address), Milady NFTs (or, let’s face it, ANY fucking NFT!), or any number of other rug pullers and such? Or are you talking the Ethereum that is so lazy an implementation that people trivially write snipe bots to manipulate values for things? Or are you talking the Ethereum so fucking lax (and convoluted in actual use) that even its founder got himself Twitter-hacked to wind up draining people’s accounts dry from a scam?
Yeah. Absolutely the org I’d trust with finance. Great suggestion, Sparky? Why not just resurrect Capone and tell people to put cash in this bag he’s holding out?
Yes. The scam has mutated. All scams do. It’s still a Ponzi scheme and suckers like you are still trying to fill out the bottom of the pyramid so that you’re not the one holding the bag when it collapses.
When.
Not if.
Go shill crypto on that distributed messaging system specifically set up to shill crypto, dude. You’ll find more receptive suckers there.
why though? Direct buy sure but why crypto? Just because you can send Disney bucks directly to someone?
Just use Kofi or Patreon and you are golden.
The payment processors take a big fee, like 3% + $0.30
You can’t just sell one song for a penny.
What are the “gas” fees for Ethereum like again. You know, one of the two you touted above as being viable alternatives to actual money.
Because I’ve tried getting money from countries like Kazakhstan and it’s not straightforward
Sure, if you have a merchant account and want to pay 3%+ on a credit card purchase it would work, just set up visa and Mastercard
But for the smaller band, they would not be taking credit card payments themselves
If we are going down that route: why Kofi or Patreon? Just use bank transfers. Payment via SEPA is commonplace, FedNow is already a thing. Even “third-world”, “backwards” countries like Brazil and India have digital payment networks.
Just use bank transfers. Payment via SEPA is commonplace
I mean, yeah, that would work as well. But would you trust any stranger/on the internet with your IBAN which is tightly linked to your person?
That Indian payment network won’t be able to deliver money to an American band
Average fediverse user seeing a platform undergo changes they dislike:
How many daily users on twitter or reddit?
We have viable alternatives for those, PeerTube for (opt in) distributed fedi-hosting large media files as well. I don’t see what technical or scalability reasons there are against a band camp replacement.
Don’t you understand? Only a for-profit, privately held (or even better, publicly traded!) company can save us!
All of these ideas are great and all but at the end of the day I will be forced to use what ever the scene I am into decides is best and therefore I can find the biggest selection of music to buy.
Currently band camp is the defacto for most releases (except for some idiotic vinyl only bullshit) within the scene I am into, but even if a great alternative is made if they don’t start selling the music I want on there then it’ll be impossible for me to use.
I think as much effort to expose a band camp alternative to artists is needed as there is needed to create the thing so people and artists can come together in said place.
For me the most important criterias are:
- ownership: I buy, I get to download (re-download) the files and use then how ever I please
- astists get a fair share: I want to maximize the share of the money I’ve spent going to the artists, and I would like the platform to be transparent, showing me with each purchase how much goes to the artitst for creating more art (if self-hosted by the artist herself/himself, this cost is then deduced)
I personally don’t care for streaming.
I would challenge your definition of streaming. I host all my own music and I stream it all the time via Airsonic-advanced (though it does get cached - and it’s constantly downloading new podcast episodes). For me it’s just the level of accessibility I consider as “streaming”.
I would challenge “unlimited” re-download in a FOSS market. This puts the long-term hosting on the market, vs the user, and is a challenge for current platforms. Perhaps re-download for a time, and of course DRM free is the key.
Man, it’s like the good old days of buying physical media. You lose or scratch your CD, you don’t get a new one for free.
Yeah, I feel like there needs to be a solution to this. Thankfully, artists don’t generally have hugely enormous catalogs that would take up terabytes of space (my entire collection is less than 400GB, which is many, many times larger than any single recording artists catalog, even the Beatles).
One rub I have with limited downloads is that memory of broken CDs. I bought a mobile app that is about $200 and they limit the number of times you can request are-download before you have to buy another license and I think it’s messed up. I’ve had to store that APK on multiple flash drives, off-site, etc.
