And the other way round. I would really, really like an aggregator of multiple ethical sources.
Maybe I’m dreaming, but something like this could be a proper challenge to the biggies?
Probably not what you had in mind here, but it sparked the following idea:
Would we be able to get the developers of the myriad native FOSS music players (like venerable mpd, or conventional-looking deadbeef) interested in integrating some form of federated discovery?
After all, those are the people who have already solved the challenge of distributing software in a way that works for their users – even if it’s just distro repos… Imagine a mpd-plugin-bonkwave 
Sure, it wouldn’t immediately reach those who are still trapped in the walled gardens. The Web remains the avenue of escape for them (opening a web page is lower friction than installing an app), but with the latest “innovations” in browsers the Web seems to be slowly collapsing under the weight of its own complexity.
Meanwhile, native apps are gonna native. I could see it working as an incentive for people to consider FOSS tech, too. “Switch to Linux - we have the music!”
This is exactly it. Federated music discovery. Music is so unsuited for discovery through microblogging. Our attention spans are so truncated. We need something!
i’ve always wanted to fork a podcast player and package it as a music player! You know, just give it the things you expect from a music player: rating, favs, playlists…
The latter part (rating, playlists) i couldn’t really see the technical solution before i discovered nostr.
Like imagine relays where you can push those parts for others to subscribe to or robots to deduce some ratings and match making.
I’m sure it could be done with acitivitypub too, it would just take another 16 years to agree on a consensus. (do we really want our playlist tied to URLs though?) Not saying it has to be nostr. More like: “the space is a void, anyone going at it could set a basline”
or bassline, what do i know?
But then again. All of that is more or less happening already with, well, podcast2 and nostr 
It just seems that most efforts are trying to build gravitational centers. Well, to federate a distributed realm.
I don’t think i would want federated recommendations, rather the most peer-to-peer possible. I don’t care what the sum of mastosoc listens to. I want to know what makes my friends vibe.
That’s actually how my main recommendation system always looked like. The auxiliary one is digital strolling, and i think an entirely new cyberspace would be needed to alter this one.
Sometimes in the shadow of the tuya trees, i find myself wishing all recommendation systems would go away in a solar flare. My anxiety over the sheer volume of music i will never have the time to listen to would probably dissapear. And we’d have to talk to each other more.
It’s so true, we have RSS supporting audio already. And I will never understand why this hasn’t been more widely used for music discovery.
Probably has something to do with music copyright making everything a total legalese nightmare…
Likely that reason yes. If only we’d made a better job at promoting Creative Commons licenses. 
I know for fact i was lousy. But i was also young and stupid. Now i am old and stupid. Which makes me less inclined to take to the moral high grounds when communicating my belief system 
I was also surprised to discover RSS and/or APub aren’t already being used for federated music discovery, considering that RSS and podcasts and all that.
In principle I’d be interested in prototyping something in that space – potentially on the basis of Faircamp. I do like what that project is doing, how it is doing it, and what I feel like I can accomplish with it – so Faircamp is my present point of reference.
A prior conversation in Beyond Faircamp in relation to Bandwagon sort of left me with the impression that there’s room for improvement for Faircamp’s RSS features, or perhaps RSS isn’t the greatest protocol for this sort of thing in the first place.
Personally, I’ve got a bit on my plate already – including a “release preparer” tool for Faircamp; not a “one click” tool but definitely a “fewer keystrokes” one – so anyone who feels like actually building something in that space is quite welcome to keep me posted on their progress. Maybe such a person could start a topic in this forum!
Incidentally, I just found https://fountain.fm/, which appears to have some Nostr support (if not based on Nostr entirely). It’s right there with the rest of the capitalism… but at least it’s a form of capitalism with less centralized middlemen? On the other hand, the crypto space, besides being 99.9% scam by volume, is something of a self-referential echo chamber, so even if they might seem to have a working implementation of microtransactions (solving the problem of easily supporting artists), in the present state it’s not a good scene. Would be happy to be proven wrong about that one.
There’s another, more abstract point to be made about music discovery. It’s the illusion of linearity: being fed things one after the another, such as in a playlist, a radio station, a newsfeed - it’s another normalization of the denial of agency within this interactive medium. Perhaps looking into ways to facilitate intentional, flow-state-based exploration, discovery, and content curation is in order.
Last.fm comes to mind – allowing people to find music not just by “what music it is” but “which of my friends likes it”, and also find people by “who likes the same music”, all in a pretty transparent way. There’s GNU FM, but it’s dead. My gold standard for aesthetic software that leverages intentionality and flow states remain video games, but building a content curation and artist facilitation system that’s as engaging as a video game is somewhat beyond my present imagination.
the crypto space, (…) in the present state it’s not a good scene.
There are basically 2 scenes: builder and degen.
Builders, as in every space, are generally intelligent and well intentioned but poor communicators. Degens are degenerate speculators.
What i see in that is potential. There’s a massive amount of room. All it takes to occupy it, is to do it in any other way than the aforementioned two. To be fair, the DeMu people are great, but they’re like 50 hardcore self-sovereign people, creating super-interactive streaming web-spaces mixing cutting edge with retro like stream chats being embedded IRC channel on super funky single page appelinies.
fountain.fm is exactly what you would think it is: a distributed and sovereign spotiface
So, not totally incomparable with the Fediverse set. Wondering if it wouldn’t make sense to invite some of them on here and find out what they’re up to – maybe they’ve actually built some actual postcapitalism this time? (Like they’ve also been promising that for 16-ish years too – same as your gripe with APub… Maybe it’s just how long it takes for enough people to reach each other through all the noise?)
Have you given it a try, as listener or publisher?
I went over its FAQ and it answered one of the questions I had: “so who pays for the disk space” – it linked to https://wavlake.com/ and https://rssblue.com/ which seem (about as) legit.
It didn’t answer my other question: how does discovery work on there (as distinct from promotion)?
I’m open to trying this, so suppose I put a song on there – how can I make sure people would randomly hear it next to similar songs by other people? (Spotify turned out to employ human playlist curators, I found it kind of surprising.) Or is it promotion-only and I gotta start building a following on Nostr for anyone to hear it?
Well what you answered was probably for this thread imo… But it moves the discussion forward either way!
It’s just the drawback of having threads I guess. Conversations aren’t necessarily linear things. Whoever guesses what interface solution I have to that is welcome to help me build it – actually I saw some extant prototype of exactly that a while back so… I was not making shit up after all? darn
Yeah, they kinda lose me with that one. OTOH one of my headmates has somebody else upload their music to youtube, which is about as closed as it gets without going full spotify… So it’s a something. I’d venture on the smaller proprietary somethings one may be little more likely to get something out of the deal than on the vast proprietary somethings
Hi there, I know a few of you, or have seen you on the Fediverse.
It’s great that there are so many new sites like Mirlo, Ampwall, etc. But it also sucks that there are so many, because the only way any of it will work is to be able to get potential listeners to a place to hear your music. You can use a number of sites like Fedica to post to all social networks at once. But there’s so much noise out there it isn’t really enough. I have no solution. There’s a flood of music daily and many who consume music have it on while they are doing other things. That is, they don’t really hear the music.
I look at all the efforts including this one that I just discovered. I wish you all as much success as is possible for your given efforts.
Yes, we are… I think? Some takeaways:
I-and-I “distribute my music with one click” by emailing it to my friend who uploads it to his YouTube channel. This is not terribly effective.
Fountain.fm is an app for automatically distributing (and, presumably, getting paid for) RSS feeds of sounds using cryptobro technology. It suffers from the same non-transparency issues as more established traditional platforms, so it’s not of immediate interest as a tool. However, it’s an interesting case study.
Besides the shady shit it’s known for, the cryptocurrency space is also home to a relatively small number of legitimate builders. But the actual culture over there is mainly AI/influencer slop because, you know, internetz.
Should we be starting a conversation with these people, and looking for actual common ground, given they seem to have solved the problem of low-friction micropayments for the modern attention span? On Nostr they’re blasting satoshis at each other’s posts like there’s no tomorrow. (Which there probably isn’t if the oceans boil.)