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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Going against the grain is tiring, especially if you do it alone. The David vs. Goliath approach doesn’t work nearly as well as the Lilliputians vs. Gulliver approach. When services link up to create a cooperative network that’s more than the sum of its parts.

I talked about what would make alternative services more useful to me as a music listener in the discoverability topic.

TL;DR;

I know I’m always drawn back to the bigger search portals (BandCamp, YouTub) because I’m most likely to find something like what I’m looking for. Searching dozens of niche sites one by one, and finding mostly tumbleweeds, isn’t that much fun.

So let’s say there’s a federation of audio-hosting and social music services. Each with a search tool that can search across the whole network, including a complete index of all known released music. If I search for Rage Against the Machine, instead of getting nothing, I could at least get a copy of some publicly available information about them, with links to all the places I can hear it, and buy it.

Bringing this back to the topic of funding, decentralising the solution also decentralises that. Many different groups contribute their own components to overall ecosystem, and each can try funding methods that seem practical and legitimate to their values and goals.

To the degree that a unified search space would make it easier for listeners to find and pay the people making music they like, that also brings more funding into the overall space. Ideally independent musicians get more money coming in, and can use some of that to contribute to the groups developing the tools helping them do that. Win-win for everyone (except wealth extractors like VCs and oligopolists).

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This has some ideas on it. I bet the author would be down to chat if anyone reached out.

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Has this already been mentioned somewhere? https://crowdbucks.fund

I will add that I know nothing about this site, apart from seeing it being shared in my timeline.

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Crowdbucks was just launcned at FediCon, and is a project by Charles Krempeaux aka @reiver, the same guy who organized the conference. There isn’t a lot of information out about it yet. The current functionality lets you set up a page and accept donations via Stripe (or donate to somebody’s page via Stripe). saw a thread from the developer saying he’s looking at Web Monetization as well.

When I looked at the site the first thing I noticed was the lack of a privacy policy. I created an account anyhow (I know, what a horrible role model I’m being here) … and there’s no way to delete it. Obviously these are problems that can be fixed but it sure sends a signal that privacy is an afterthought (which is consistent with at least one of Charles’ other projects). Still, alternatives to Patreon and PayPal are certainly useful, and he’s friendly with a lot of fediverse influencers, so it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves.

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Thanks for this. I thought it looked really intriguing then I clicked off when I couldn’t find a FAQ or “about us” page.

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