January 2025 Update
Hello Wagoneers! (I’m going with that until y’all stop me)
There is a lot of exciting stuff going on here at Bandwagon HQ, and I’m super excited to share it all with you. Let’s jump right in.
Internet Radio Stations
Today, we’re announcing big progress towards one of the major goals on our music discovery roadmap by helping music fans to find your music on Internet radio stations.
Our first with Internet streaming partnership is online now. With this update, you can publish your music directly from your profile to The Indie Beat – a human-curated, opt-in Fediverse stream from the Kirsten Lambertsen of PatronHunt. The goal here is to make another way to get your music out to potential fans, then pull them back to your Fediverse profiles on Bandwagon. I believe strongly that Kirsten and her project shares our artist-first values, and will be a great way for more people to discover your work.
It’s taken quite a lot of engineering to work out how to do this efficiently while still giving you maximum control over your work, and I’m very proud of the final results. Here are a few of the new additions:
Distribution Permissions
And when you publish an album, there’s also a new “Distribution” option that lets you choose stations to publish to. It is important for us to give you as much control over your work as possible, so we’re making each of the publishing targets clear to you, and letting you decide whether or not to stream your work on those channels.
Each station will be different, and will have their own process for getting your music into their rotation, but Bandwagon gets you to the front of the line by putting everything in the formats they need to get started, including: your artist info, album art, song lyrics, and more.
Our list of supported stations may grow as we make arrangements with other online streamers, but I’ll make you this promise: we will only work with stations that put you first, respect your rights as an artist, and work to make your music more successful.
Copyright / Album Licensing
Now, when you publish an album, you’ll see a new “License” option. This lets you specify the general license you’re releasing your music under, whether you retain full Copyright ownership of it, or if you’re using one of several Creative Commons licenses.
Licensing information also shows up on the album, as well, with links to further details from Creative Commons. If you have different licenses you’d like to use, please let me know and I’ll try to add them to the list.
A Salute to Radio Free Fedi
If you haven’t already heard, the team at Radio Free Fedi is sunsetting their online station. For two years, this has been one of the best ways to find new music on the Fediverse, and they’ve also been instrumental in helping design the licensing and distribution tools I’m announcing today. So, while we won’t be publishing music to RFF, we owe them our eternal thanks and gratitude for helping get this release off the ground.
Thank you RFF, for everything.
And, if you haven’t already, stop by there and catch one of their streams – Main, Comfy, and Specialty – before the station goes dark in January. You can tell your grandkids you were there when it was live.
Free/Premium in 2025
I’d originally planned to switch Bandwagon.fm to a paid subscription model some time in 2025, once we reach the import/export milestone and everyone has a chance to self-host their data. It’s an important part of demonstrating a viable, sustainable funding model for every server on the Fediverse, Bandwagon.fm included.
After several online conversations with Wagoneers and other Fediverse developers, I’m commiting to finding a way to make Bandwagon profiles free for any musicians who want one. There will likely still be paid, or premium features, but I promise I’ll make some core feature set free for as long as I run Bandwagon.fm.
Discovery and Search
In addition to streaming partnerships, we’re also building out our own music-centric search engine on Bandwagon and Bandwagon.fm. It’s a unique blend of standard search tech with open Fediverse protocols, and there’s nothing else like it on the Fediverse, today. I teased a screenshot of the work-in-progress on Mastodon, and in January I’ll be giving existing Wagoneers an exclusive preview to how it works.
Open Source Update
This project is moving very quickly now, so I want to address the difference between “Bandwagon” the open source app that anyone can host themselves, and “Bandwagon.fm” the flagship server that I’m running. I’ve always tried to be clear about this distinction, but these new publishing features blur the lines, so it’s important to make this transparent from the get-go.
Publishing via Bandwagon / Bandwagon.fm
In building out the new publishing features, it was immediately clear that someone running their own “instance” of the open source Bandwagon app may not want to publish to the same places that Bandwagon.fm does. Or, they may have exclusive connections to other radio stations that Bandwagon.fm does not have.
With this in mind, we’ve made the publishing features in Bandwagon available for anyone to use, so that every Bandwagon instance will be able to publish music anywhere they want. However, this means that the specific stations used by each instance are controlled by the admins of that instance. It takes some extra work to set up individual data feeds with each Internet radio station, and this is something I’ll have to leave up to each Bandwagon admin to do themselves.
Roadmap
As far as the project roadmap is concerned, I believe all of the published dates are still on track, with the big goal being the Import/Export tool due in the first half of 2025. This is the milestone I’m shooting for, and when I’ll say that Bandwagon is ready for others to self-host their own instances.
Until then, I’m encouraging other Fediverse developers to tinker with the code to see what works for them, and I’m encouraging musicians and other artists to make free profiles on Bandwagon.fm. Things are still changing too quickly for me to support other people’s installations right now, so please set up your data on this server (that I’m watching very carefully) and I’ll help you migrate your data to your own instances after we reach that big Import/Export milestone later in 2025.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://bandwagon.fm/67564da504431a2c35b67fde