Would you consider that Patreon meets the minimum criteria to be an OK option for social music artists? I best most people here will say that it is not the best, but is it good enough to be considered an OK option?
I’m not sure what that means. They’re really like Bandcamp and Kickstarter or other similarly massive VC money funded hegemonic startups? People should use them if they feel it can help them acheive financial stability, it’s really like everything else, again, like Bandcamp and Kickstarter.
They’ve pulled a move recently where they’re trying to become a social network which I personally really don’t like and I think goes against the very value proposition of Patreon, but it makes sense for them to want to scale more and more because again, centralized VC money funded startup.
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Ok, thank you for the short and clear answer. I should have done my little research about how Patreon was and is funded. I just had the image of the CEO artist entrepreneur, which I hope is as legit as it looks like, but indeed doesn’t change the fact about how the company came to be and is financed.
I would really love to move away from these “artist entrepreneur” narratives as if it’s in any way indicative of anything. Goldman Sachs’ CEO has a music career and performs in festivals as “DJ D-Sol” it really doesn’t makes him a champion of the arts. How these companies are structured, who funds them and who they fundamentally serve is what matters.
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So the middle-finger to these types of companies will be crowdfunded by artists & those in the music scene themselves? Federated? Open-source? All of the above?
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It’s definitely “all of the above” and more to me. Part of what makes building a coherent ecosystem is to answer for the variety of use cases and possibilities that might need to come at it from very different angles. The point of having something federated is to welcome diversity of means and approaches, but that also mean having a basis in place capable of handling such diversity without it all exploding, it’s a hard task.
But yes, basically what we’re trying to do, collaborating with Fairplayer, Bandwaggon, Jam, Faircamp and so on and so forth is to offer many such approaches, and help them come together in a shared network.
The important part to understand, imo, is that the difficulty is not coding it, and it was outlined above very well : the difficulty is figuring out the baseline principles that make one project “a part of it or not”. And I would actually say this is not so much something connected to how whatever structure you’re a part of is setup. If tomorrow Patreon decided to follow the ethos of the social music network, join and help it grow, I would personally welcome it, the thing is I just doubt they would because they would have more to lose from a purely “shareholder oriented perspective”, and little to gain beyond “we’re doing something good and creating commons”.
I think it’s always how you judge who is what and why ultimately, the structure of an entity is a thing, it has its use, but what the entity allows to make happen is what trully defines it in my opinion.
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In my (Subjam’s) case, the the difficulty is coding it since I (the founder) am not a skilled enough coder to do it. I’m an expert DevOps + sys/netadmin, and all other hats, but must pay others to help me with the actual mobile apps + most of the backend (rails, etc.) work. So my focus lately has been on gaining sponsorships + other crowdfunding by those actually in the scene. It takes a team, for sure, to truly succeed.
I like the diversity in the F/OSS + music ecosystems these days. What’s a bit discouraging, though, is that there are so many that do extremely similar things, so “the masses” just go to the ones with the biggest audience..which, unfortunately, is Meta platforms, TikTok, YT, etc… and as we all know, none of those actually care about what they’re doing beyond their bottom line.
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This is exactly why I’m saying the coding isn’t the main difficulty. Because even if you could do the whole code without any problem whatsoever, this scattered reality of the audience across multiple platforms, fighting whoever has the biggest means to build catalogue, fighting for people’s attention, then making sure that whatever you provide as an alternative actually proves to be useful beyond being different, then figuring out financial resilience, all of that wouldn’t go away if you had the capacity to figure out the code part, it would just add up, and I think it would be harder to confront.
Subjam is a completely different platform and I’m 100% confident from everyone I’ve talked to over the past 5 years that what it does is useful enough that people will want it enough for it to be sustainable… if I could only finish the core functionality of the mobile apps. Money’s a real bitch sometimes.
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