I’m envisioning a music platform where I can listen to music, like a streaming service, but where the business model is based on recording purchases, not streaming royalties. Here’s how I see it working.
I choose a weekly amount to contribute towards supporting musicians (eg $5 a week), and set up an automated payment to the music platform. Which also offers a mechanism for adding lump sums, for gig workers whose income is more uneven and unpredictable. At the end of each month, the platform calculates which recordings I’ve been listening to the most, ignores those I’ve already paid for, and automatically purchases as many on the remaining list as I can afford of. How many recordings get purchased each month will depend on a few variables, including how much money I’ve put into the platform, how much I’ve listened to music there, and how much I’ve been listening to recordings I already paid for.
Like BC, the platform would enable me to download any recording I’ve paid for, in my file format of choice, so I can own them digitally. It would also allow me to specify whether I want to receive physical copies of the recordings, or other merch musicians are offering as a perk of purchasing. In my case I probably wouldn’t, since I’m a minimalist who moves around a lot. But collectors, or people with more stable, spacious housing, would presumably tick that box.
Potential benefits;
All music is available to be discovered by everyone
People can contribute based on what we can afford at any given time
The mental transaction costs of deciding which recordings to pay for is automated away, without creating any anxiety about blowing my budget
Funds currently siphoned off by DataFarmers running music platforms can be redirected back to musicians and those who provide useful support services to them
Hello @strypey ! So this is pretty much something I’ve been working on conceptually for a while and have given… way too much thought to actually. There are a lot of pitfalls that need to be accounted for that don’t meet the eye at first glance (longform music vs shortform music, music you don’t want to pay for, variation in listening amount over several time periods, how to define value of each listen etc.) but I think they can all be sort of figured out.
We’ve been thinking of implementing something like this within Mirlo later down the road, but also, since Mirlo aims to be federated and we’re very keen on figuring out interoperability, we also were wondering if this wouldn’t be even better if this was service agnostic and could work across multiple platforms (Ampwall, Jam, Bandwaggon etc.). Maybe we’ll have to do it ourselves first and figure out interop later, but that’d be so much better if we could figure it out beforehand.
Long story short I’m fully on board with the concept of “streaming payment as monthly donation” vs “streaming payment as a subscription fee to access catalogue”. I think the former is a much better definition of what people think they’re doing when they’re paying a subscription and encapsulate a narrative that makes more sense. What would make it even better and what I’ve been pondering over the years is how to give as much control to the listener over the money they’re spending that way, and how to have a baseline system that rewards different types of music equally regardless of their form, basically how do we reinject some form of human-logic into a “low-level interaction” since payments are sort of automated, and the music listening experience is everything but an automatic thing where everything is worth the same.
Not only do I agree that it absolutely would, I think it would be much easier to figure out the accounting for federated purchases vs. figuring out a fair distribution of revenue from streaming subscriptions across a federated network.
That’s going to depend on whether the teams at @bandwagon, @jam, etc, are willing to collaborate on developing this as a federated feature. But I hope they are, because it’s a lot easier to design something like this for interop from Day 1, than to try and tack in on later. It could be documented as an FEP, so any federated music platform could implement it to add their catalogue and members to the purchasing network.
I’ll have to think about this, and feel free to expand on exactly what you mean here, so I’ve got more of a sense of what your goals and considerations are.
Speaking as a music fan rather than a music maker, I want my music listening app to eventually purchase any album or song I listen to more than twice. If I had a generous salary, I’d load up my account with a few hundred bucks at a time, so whenever I listened to something for the third time it would get purchased. Since my budget, like most people’s, is much more limited, I want it to prioritise the music I listen to the most. But because it’s a purchase, not a donation, this corrects against any tendency for artists who already have a big fan base to take the lion’s share of the money audiences put into the platform. Does this make sense?