Fair and autonomous playlists

General
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This draft aims to become part of the Knowledge base. Edits welcome!

Playlists are a simple and widely used way to collect, curate, promote and discover music and their makers. However, they are hard to find and hard(er) to create in the context of fair and autonomous music platforms and the Fediverse.

In fact, playlists are not that simple. Create a list of music tracks and publish it somewhere is simple, but this alone didn’t bring playlists to the relevance they have nowadays. You also need

  • the possibility to listen the tracks in a playlist sequencially or randomly, as if it would be an album
  • the possibility to create and share playlists where music fans will find them.

Centralized platforms with big catalogs solve this problem with… centralization. They offer curated playlists to their users and they allow users the possibility to create and share their own playlists. Having the possibility to create playlists in fair and autonomous platforms would already be an improvement, but the question is: what would it take to create a decentralized and federated playlist system?

Let’s look at the status quo.

Decentralized playlists

This means, playlists created with tracks from any social music platform. Do they exist? Is there someone working or thinking about this problem? Any research made? Edits welcome!

Single platform playlists

This means, playlists created with tracks from connected instances of the same music platform.

Funkwhale allows users to create playlists with tracks of any Funkwhale instance and share them across all instances, just in the local instance, or not share them and keep them as a private collection. See the documentation and an example (more examples welcome).

Single instance playlists

This means, playlists created with tracks hosted on a single instance of a fair and autonomous music platform. Do they exist? Is there someone working or thinking about this problem? Any research made? Edits welcome!

Online services to create playlists

This means, websites that offer the possibility to create a playlist not tied to a single platform.

ListenBrainz, part of MusicBrainz, ows registered users to create public and private playlists. Public playlists can be searched, which means that we could agree on keywords and queries to find these playlists. The problem is that users can only add tracks available in the MusicBrainz database, and as of April 2025 the social music platforms are not connected. Artists and anyone really can add albums and tracks to MusicBrainz, but that might too much effort for someone just curating a playlist.

Manual playlists

This means, old school collections of tracks typed manually with links that people must manually follow to listen to the music. These lists are still important, the hardest work is to make the selection, but they are less convenient to use compared to pressing play and starting to listen.

To circumvent this problem, sometimes these manual playlists are complemented with Mixtapes, Podcasts or Radio programs featuring the tracks.

Where can these playlists be found?

  • NHAM Mixtapes - Music from the Fediverse every month.
  • Audio Interface Music Radio - Offers various shows and each show creates a playlist with the tracks featured in each program, which generally come from the social / fair / autonomous / open scenes.
  • Edits welcome!

See also this proposal to have a corner to share playlists on TSMN.

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https://listenbrainz.org/ also has playlist

they could be synced with funkwhale, they have an export import option

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Could you elaborate on why this would need ActivityPub? To me this feels like it’s more about making the music data standardized on an API endpoint (through something like oEmbed), where you add a link to the canonical track, and it returns the data in a standardized way (why not id3 tags) with a pointer to where the audio can be streamed from.

I’d be interested to see what information funkwhale makes available so that other instances can stream.

The main issue I foresee is that different platforms have different ways of allowing streaming of music, and also that “is allowed to listen to a track” is hard to verify (solved by letting tracks be preview tracks). For example, we use m3u8 playlists, which is fairly standard for streaming (and is helpful if you want to prevent someone from just downloading the track and control access to the entirety of the track, or do stuff like tracking what parts were listened to, or more importantly, be more available on low bandwidth platforms), but I think other platforms use simpler audio files (like just serving an mp3 file).

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Good point, thank you. I have added a section about online services to create playlists, and I hope I have got it right. It’s been ages since the last time I logged in to MusicBrainz. I could create a playlist easily but then when I tried to add tracks from TSMN-like music makers it was a hit and (especially) miss.

I wonder what would it take to push data from the social music platforms. Funkwhale is mentioned on Add data but I guess that refers to manual imports? I see that maybe there are good news about a more automatic way: Integrate music streaming from Funkwhale & Navidrome (Subsonic) - GSoC applications - MetaBrainz Community Discourse

Sure, the elaboration is that I’m just volunteering to draft about things I don’t really know about :wink: with the hope that they are useful and encourage others to comment and improve. As you just did, thank you. I have removed mentions to ActivityPub and now the draft just speaks about connected platforms. I hope it is better now.

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