Funding for musicians & devs

General
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“Marketing” is the hardest thing, isn’t it? Even the word is kinda sullied now. I want to find honest and ethical ways for people to learn about my music, other Fedi musicians’ work, and our incredible growing music platform ecosystem.

I’d love to somehow coordinate our funding efforts here. I feel there might be a way to make lots of little projects into one BIG project. With multiple international funders.

Goals:

  • Along with individual artist PR, what about “marketing” the idea of the Fediverse and our new open music platform ecosystem? What is essential to communicate? Could we share graphics, taglines, etc.?
  • Can we pursue cross-platform NLnet/other tech funding, to help devs work together to increase music discovery vectors?
  • Coordinate artist advocacy & awareness campaigns with open music platform’s campaigns

Stuff we can do now:

  • Strategies & advocacy efforts for leaving Big Social & Big Streamers. (Is it possible for everyone? Can we make the case to funding bodies that we have an alternative that works? DO we have an alternative that works, currently?)
  • Sharing info on local nights for touring.

Funding bodies:

In the UK there’s:

  • Arts Council of England
  • PRS Foundation
  • Help Musicians

For devs, I’m only aware of NLNet.

Anyone else on here applying for funding, and want to talk? Or even without funding, do you just want to get in on any of these ideas?

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Why, absolutely! How would one go about that? I honestly have no idea, or perhaps less than no idea.

I recently learned about NLNet grants and they seem like the first funding body that I find applicable to the sphere and scope of my skills and interests.

Regardless of my pretty out there former experience with grantfarming, still I’d rather prefer looking into something that alongside collaborators to keep me grounded. (More reliable ones this time, I would hope.) Because I bet the proverbial farm on not learning to see how the “big money people” do, and thus couldn’t fathom what they’d actually like to see – or indeed how they ended up with so much money if the idea is for us to tell them what they want (as is often the case with the entire concept of retaining a knowledge worker out here in the outskirts of Orkland…)

NLnet in particular does seem like a realistic way for me to fund a certain backburner project of mine, one that is not music-specific, rather in general interest of the Web; and particularly the transparently decentralized parts of it such as APub, ATProto, or Nostr – but good old HTTP is also fine. (Details over E2EE.)

Hackery aside, purely temporal media-wise: I would love to do some form of artist residence at some point in my life. However, as that would presumably involve demonstrating results – which for me would preferably take the form of a live musical performance – it’s also contingent on completing my present tool-building arc. I’m generally unfamiliar with the whole process of negotiating such a thing into existence, I don’t think I could become good at that fast enough, though stranger things have happened.

Being the faceless fixer for the artists actually making names for themselves feels… safer, I guess? I have no need to put myself out there – just my thoughts and my work.

So, if anyone is giving out grants for spiteful schizotypals to stay out of the culture, well sign me up – it’s what my present poorly gilded handcuffs amount to, anyway :grin:

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I also want to know this.

Do we have an alternative for listeners to leave big social/big stream? How can we incentivize and facilitate them? Say, I travel around, chat with people, say how I’m not too big on surveillance/ad based cultural economy. “Okay,” they say, “what should I use instead?”

“You shouldn’t use”, perhaps I ought to say, “you should participate!”

My point of reference is a perhaps imaginary past where everyone in the village played an instrument. But they have not even that point of reference.

For them music is like one big ad for feeling emotions instead of for buying things. As far as means of communications go, I’ve tried suggesting different things that I’ve been big on at the time – alternative social media and chat apps mainly, since I spent the longest time thinking everybody just downloads their music as files. Spotify snuck up on me completely.

And so, my recommendations don’t stick – it’s not like they’re particularly slick. Developers of alternatives, as radically justice driven as they may be, burn out, or drop the ball. I think we’re seeing another phase of that with the present enshittification of Firefox – one of the more well-established alternatives to people’s general information workflow, even if always a sort of “loyal opposition”, dropped some pretenses just recently.

So, these days, people hardly even try alternatives. App fatigue is real. The recommendation that sticks most is, well, torrents. Because free shit.

What can I offer the average consumer that works with, not against their current “passive consumer” mentality, and only gradually empowers them, same as they were gradually frog-boiled by toxic corporate culture in the first place?

What’s a cultural technology that presently doesn’t have critical mass, but can obtain it with the help of a funding body? Will anyone give a grant that enables us to pay, say 10EUR to 1000 people to join the Fediverse and stick around for a while, same as cryptoscammers do “airdrops” to incentivize completely random people into joining their faux-networks? Press X to doubt, ZIRP is over…

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Linking in a reply from another topic Ork plays grantfarmer - #3 by Mel

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Just a note for future readers: we have a page in the Knowledge base about Grants for music makers and friends where we want to add everything we know.

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