I wonder if something could be built based on fediverse technology. Artists could host their own instance of some music library software, and have granular control over how it’s monetized - pay per stream, buy a digital copy of a specific song/album, have monthly fees for different tiers of access, you could maybe even sell merch or concert tickets on it - kind of like Patreon, except the instance owner has full control over what’s offered and how it’s monetized. And then in the client for this new thing, you could have a list of all the instances and choose which ones you want to give money to, and if it spoke ActivityPub, you could integrate some sort of feed into Lemmy/Mastodon/etc clients.
Resilience - if one server goes down, only that one artist’s music becomes unavailable
Control - if the artist owns the server, they can control it/moderate it as they see fit
You can’t really count on either of those things if you’re putting your music up on Spotify, Tidal, etc.
Edit: there would be nothing stopping several artists from handing together and hosting all their music from a single server/instance, if they wanted to. That’s the point though, there’s choice
Okay, so what I really meant was how federation the way it works here would be of any use. It’d actually make the artist lose all control, as everything gets mirrored.
If we use the federation as nothing but a discovery mechanism for other nodes, I guess it would accomplish those goals. But then you could do it without the federation too. Have a central discovery server so that any apps immediately know where to connect, instead of the user having to choose (federation is confusing for normies, remember?)
Right, ActivityPub would really just be the discovery mechanism, obviously you wouldn’t want the actual music to be mirrored to other instances.
If you use a centralized discovery server, you’re right back to where you are with Spotify - at the mercy of whoever controls the discovery server, and shit out of luck if the discovery server goes down. Federation is only confusing for normies because the clients for popular fediverse apps don’t do a good job of making that part clear (or hiding it away).
I wonder if something could be built based on fediverse technology. Artists could host their own instance of some music library software, and have granular control over how it’s monetized - pay per stream, buy a digital copy of a specific song/album, have monthly fees for different tiers of access, you could maybe even sell merch or concert tickets on it - kind of like Patreon, except the instance owner has full control over what’s offered and how it’s monetized. And then in the client for this new thing, you could have a list of all the instances and choose which ones you want to give money to, and if it spoke ActivityPub, you could integrate some sort of feed into Lemmy/Mastodon/etc clients.
Why bother with the federation if every artist is going to have to host their own instance to keep control of how content is played and monetized?
For the same reasons Lemmy is federated:
You can’t really count on either of those things if you’re putting your music up on Spotify, Tidal, etc.
Edit: there would be nothing stopping several artists from handing together and hosting all their music from a single server/instance, if they wanted to. That’s the point though, there’s choice
Okay, so what I really meant was how federation the way it works here would be of any use. It’d actually make the artist lose all control, as everything gets mirrored.
If we use the federation as nothing but a discovery mechanism for other nodes, I guess it would accomplish those goals. But then you could do it without the federation too. Have a central discovery server so that any apps immediately know where to connect, instead of the user having to choose (federation is confusing for normies, remember?)
Right, ActivityPub would really just be the discovery mechanism, obviously you wouldn’t want the actual music to be mirrored to other instances.
If you use a centralized discovery server, you’re right back to where you are with Spotify - at the mercy of whoever controls the discovery server, and shit out of luck if the discovery server goes down. Federation is only confusing for normies because the clients for popular fediverse apps don’t do a good job of making that part clear (or hiding it away).