Developers have expectations about how their software or online service will be used, based on how they’ve designed them. Although the way people actually use it sometimes surprises them. But in the early days of online music platforms, it seemed like the intention was for SoundCloud to be a place for uploading WIP, for-fun remixes, and other random audio noodlings people wanted to share, while BandCamp was to be a place for showcasing polished musical works, and making them available for sale.
Obviously this isn’t a hard distinction; musicians will move from one to the other, or do a bit of both, and one person’s random noodlings is another person’s polished work (and vice-versa, of course ). But I think it is a useful distinction, and no less so for the social music network. If we can’t find ways to separate these things out in our discovery tools, the risk is that music fans will see TSMN only as be seen as a place to explore amateur audio, and go back to the platforms for the “professional” stuff.
I’d like TSMN to be a place where people trying to make a living from their art can sell records/ merch, promote shows, sell gig tickets, etc. I also want hobby musicians to feel like first-class citizens of the network, free to share their noodlings for streaming/ download and discuss them with other musicians and fans, just like they can on SoundCloud. But to make this workable, we need ways to clearly label which is which, and make it discoverable in the relevant places.
In the platform world this is done by having different platforms for different purposes; like BandCamp for professional work, SoundCloud for general sharing (although I know this isn’t a hard distinction in practice). How might we do it in the TSMN?
I got to thinking about this after spending some time last night and this afternoon listening to various albums on BandWagon. Some of them were songs I could easily believe the artist had played at gigs. Others sounded like recordings of someone experimenting with a new synthesizer or music software (I won’t name names, because I don’t want to offend anyone, and all of this is just my subjective opinion, of course). Both are perfectly valid things to share in TSMN. But if I was a DJ shopping for new music to buy, for example, I would have been a frustrated that I couldn’t filter out the experiments and focus my listening time on the polished stuff.
Respectfully, I dissagree on number of points here.
But first, let me say I understand the frustration or need that you are voicing. As a DJ that plays a very particular kind of music in the club - and also someone who ran radio show for quite some years - I know how time consuming is to search for things you are after among things you don’t want. But I think you are placing the desire to solve an obstacle to get to the music you are interested in - at the wrong place.
So let me point out my perspective:
I don’t see BandCamp v. SoundCloud that different - well yeah, there are tools directed into different needs - Bandcamp excells at ‘releasing and promoting’ music stuff, and SoundCloud… less so, and it’s easier to upload WIP. But then again - SoundCloud offers playlists that serve as ‘releases’, download links and more, but also more social tools (timed comments), but i’ve seen number of WIP on Bandcamp too, there’s also private/secret links one can use to share a WIP album, and even after releasing an album it can be edited and changed!
I feel hobbyist vs professional distinction as a quality guideline is false - you very well know there’s so much trash and tasteless music that is considered professional only because it goes through specific publishing channels, is mixed and mastered by paid engineers and might even succeed in the charts, and on the other hand there’s hobby musicians that are incredibly talented and when they make something it’s completely off the charts in terms of quality, but they do it in their free time and are not serious about their careers. so, personally, to me, this distinction is useless filter taxonomy in this context.
I feel we created TSMN to foster (and archive) discussions about fair music platforms, their development, differences, also promotional strategies… but a forum to be social about all these aspects of music-making and -”consuming” that are also alternative to The Big Tech and Major Label systems that oppress us all. I don’t think we talked about this space to be a market place (at least not primarily) or discovery platform - but perhaps I’m wrong and it needs to grow into something like that.
Personally, as a DJ, I come here not to shop for new music - I use Bandcamp (more and more!), but also so called “pro” dancefloor electronic music shops Volumo, Beatport. This is because I’m after certain type of sound, mix, and mastering, so I go to those specific channels. I come to TSMN to read and write and discuss about community of developers, listeners, curators, technology, DIY/DIWO, etc…
I really don’t see this distinction that you are proposing as beneficial in the context of TSMN.
OK, I see my sloppy use of terminology has created some confusion here. I was using “the social music network” as a shorthand for the network of services that host or otherwise distribute music (FairCamp sites, Jam.coop, DistroSub, FairPlayer, etc), and shortening that to TSMN. But of course, TSMN is already common shorthand for this forum itself, which was not what I meant at all. My bad!
Can anyone suggest a word or phrase I could use to describe the fair music hosts as a network? Particular an aspirational future version, where discovery is possible across all of them (as it currently is to some degree across FunkWhale, BandWago, and Mirlo).
I was using these terms in a fairly loose way (thus the scare quotes around them). But since you picked up that the distinction I was making was about polish (I prefer that term to “quality”, which comes with a lot of baggage and perceived judgements), I think my meaning was pretty clear in context.
To be clear, I’m not talking about trying to have some some of “central quality-assurance committee” rating everyone’s releases as “professional” or “hobbyist”. I’m talking about ways for the artists to mark the music they share as either a) polished releases for distribution (whether they’re selling or giving away), or b) something else; eg WIP for feedback, unfinished tracks to be remixed, live recordings for posterity, etc. Then allowing discovery tools like Unstream to filter according to which of these the person searching is looking for.
Meanwhile, tools that enable following the artist’s account on their music host (via RSS, AP, Chorus, or whatever) deliver a feed that contains whichever of these types of releases the artist shares, as they share them. But marked accordingly. So listeners have an idea what we’re about to listen to if we play it.
As someone who also spends quite some time listening to new releases in fair platforms (and before in Soundcloud and Bandcamp…), I also understand the problem, but I’m not sure there is an easy solution.
First, your distinction between Bandcamp and Soundcloud doesn’t stand in reality. In addition to what @prinlu has said, Soundcloud even offers a service to publish your music on the mainstream platforms (for a fee), and its catalog includes fully commercial releases.
But back to the fair platforms. As I see it, part of the problem is that the catalogs are relatively small and there is no automatic promotion / filtering. This is why the average listener has more chances to find music that for most listeners would sound as experiments, demos, “unfinished”… Chances are that the same creators release the same tracks on Soundcloud / Bandcamp, but it’s more difficult to find them casually there.
I also believe that while some people publishes music that is indeed practice / experiments / “unfinished” by their own definition, many more are just happy publishing that music as true releases, and they tag them “#experimental”, “#glitch”, “#noise”, “#ambient”… and they may even ask 7€ for it. Sometimes I honestly wonder whether these creators have listened to their own release twice from beginning to end. But hey, to each their own. Meanwhile, I have found music that for my standards and taste is very good, and objectively you can hear that it took many hours to produce it (not an absolute measure, but at least you see the minimum effort required), and it is released for free / name your price.
I don’t have a good solution, but it probably goes through not showing the full recent stream of releases to casual users but only releases that have been purchased / downloaded / fully streamed N times. Which I bet is what Bandcamp / Soundcloud do unless you start following tags, artists, etc.
Sure, but having the tools for flagging and filtering would improve the signal to noise ratio. Including when WIP, jam recordings, etc is what you’re looking for (eg under a libre license as a source of remix samples).
Say CCMixter joined the discovery network, or itch.io. A lot of the music there is intended to be remixed, or used in a video, respectively, while some of it is intended as polished releases. A way for artists to flag their intentions would reduce the noise. As would listeners being able to filter out music from services hosting a lot of music they consider misfiled or otherwise uninteresting, from the search results they see.
A folksonomy system that filters per service could be an interesting approach too. Say there was an AP-enabled music listening service I could log into, and see releases and social messages from all the artists I follow, and a search system. As newly shared tracks and collections come in, people using the service could tag them, according to their understanding of what they are. Then if some is looking for, say, remixes, the top results would be the ones the most people on their service tagged as remixes, and so on down to the ones only 1 person tagged as remixes.
Remote music publishing services could also be rated automatically, according to the tags that come with shared music, and how well they match the way the people on the listening service have tagged them. With search results from services that tag in alignment given higher weighting in the search results.
Indeed, this is another way of doing automated filtering. It doesn’t really capture the fact that polished releases isn’t always what people are looking for. But it would clearly be useful for people looking for the kind of stuff they might hear on music podcasts or college radio, or read about in a Selecteh.
). But I think it is a useful distinction, and no less so for the social music network. If we can’t find ways to separate these things out in our discovery tools, the risk is that music fans will see TSMN only as be seen as a place to explore amateur audio, and go back to the platforms for the “professional” stuff.