Can we agree that the hashtag situation for music makers is a mess on Mastodon and beyond? What if we could agree on a set of hashtags that we would promote and use consistently, so that music lovers and other music makers could watch the right hashtags and discover music, artists, news fitting their interests?
For example:
New music
I’m launching this music today
Buy my music
Early access codes
Discounts
I’m enjoying this new music
I purchased this new music
Even better if we can plug the style and the language of the music.
Campaigns (i.e. Fair Trade Music Fridays)
I’m going to participate in this campaign as a music maker
I’m going to buy music during this campaign
Gigs
(announcing concerts, ticket discounts…)
fediverse live music streaming: FediWave
Collaboration
I’m looking for … to collaborate on a new song.
I’m working on a new song and I’m looking for feedback
In Bandwagon, I’m still wanting to make suggestions for the various kinds of tags people use. If we can come up with any sort of conventions, I’ll happily prompt people to use them when they publish music.
[language] - the language used in the lyrics - or specify whether it’s instrumental.
[basic genre] - it would be useful to agree on a basic list, or probably there is already one used by the music industry?
Optional tags
Meaning, only to be considered if you have something special to offer.
[optional subgenre(s)] - sure, go wild and identify your niche if you want to.
[optional location] - A town, city, region or country that the music or the artists connects with.
[optional basic license] - if it’s an open license i.e. CreativeCommons, and it’s probably better to agree on a short generic list rather than getting into too specific tags nobody watches.
[optional type] (is there a better name for this? Whether it is one short track, one long-format track, an album, a mix, a compilation…
[optional format] - if it’s not digital e.g. vinyl, tape, CD…
[optional platform] - if you want to promote the platform-community where you publish your music e.g. Mirlo, Bandwagon, Faircamp, Funkwhale…
But it strikes me… maybe we should look at it the other way around. What sort of hashtags are music-lovers following? Some Fedi polls might be helpful here.
Here are some music related ones I’m following:
#Bandcamp
#beYourOwnPlatform
#bonkwave
#electronicMusic
#experimentalPop (no one uses this, even me!)
#faircamp
#fediMusic
#fediPlay
#fediwave
#flute
#glitch (mostly used for visual glitch I think)
#industrial
#industrialMusic
#jellyfin
#linuxAudio
#Mixxx
#music
#musicDiscovery
#musodon
#noiseMusic
#pipewire
#PeerTube
#rnb
#soundtrack
#synthwave
#vj
@Mel Any survey to identify widely used hashtags in the Fediverse is useful, and if more people want to share here hashtags they are watching, it will be very helpful.
Said that, we might be talking about the same from two different ends. I have organized your list following the structure proposed above and I got this:
The hypothesis I’m proposing is that music maker’s works will be easier to discover if we use hashtag types more consistently, as we will help more people to find us.
These “other” options are very interesting because… aren’t they basically the same? And there is probably more. Does this overlapping diversity help music makers and music fans to find each other? Would it be useful for TSMN to propose specific tags? Genuine questions.
For instance, when someone posts #MyMusic on the Fediverse, that makes it tick several boxes above. And when someone wants to promote someone else’s music published in the Fediverse, #FediMusic would cover it.
Language might not be that relevant for all the music created with English lyrics, but the moment we leave that big global soup, it starts becoming more important. As a Spanish and Catalan native speaker, I definitely put more attention to music created in these languages and posted on fair and social platforms, and my motivation / predisposition to know more about their artists and follow them / crowdfund their projects is also higher when I like their music.
The problem is… do we have good tags to find this music? One option would be to use the native name of the language, but I’m not sure who follows those tags – I don’t even do it for tiny Catalan language. It would be different if there would be (and maybe there are?) tags for #MúsicaEnEspañol, #MúsicaEnCatalà, and so on.
I’m curious about what music makers producing music in not-English think about this.
Or maybe something even more precise, to avoid being mixed with the commercial music in these languages? #FediMúsicaEnEspañol, #FediMúsicaEnCatalà, etc?
“Fediverse” might not be an accurate concept to capture social, fair, autonomous production and distribution, but “social music” might be something very different, and in the end these tags are to be used mostly in the Fediverse social networks…
I miss some feedback that helps me get a sense about how to proceed, but I’ll proceed anyway because I can’t think of a lower hanging fruit than hashtags to improve music & musicians discoverability.
I’ll update the top post with my draft suggestion above, with the intention to move it to Knowledge base. There is one point I keep thinking about and I really welcome your feedback:
At least on Mastodon, you can watch one tag but not the intersection of two tags. While I can tag a post with #FediMusic #Pop and this will describe my new song very well, people can only watch each tag separately, and they will get plenty of not-pop FediMusic and not-FediMusic pop. Would it be a good idea to suggest the construction of precise tags like #FediMusicPop or just leave the “problem” as is?
this reminds me that both mastodon.art and merveilles.town have each their own pool/rules of tags to use.i think it’s a matter of creating this taxonomy and regularly remind people to use them
I know this isn’t what you’re talking about specifically, and I’m just thinking out loud cuz I have no idea how these algorithms work, but I try different things anyway
I have been testing different hashtags with different subjects, and I’ve experienced the broadest topic ones seem to really help, along with the specific ones that you are talking about.
I’ve gotten more interaction on music releases by starting with just the basic #music tag, then adding the specific ones. Maybe it’s like categories on a site, and it drills down? Like maybe it thinks of it like music/ccmusic/altrock, I don’t know. Like I said, I have no idea how it works
The prompts a question for me; are you proposing a standard for the use of tags in the fediverse, or for the use of tags across social software in general, including the legacy platforms? If it’s the latter - and that would be more effective as people adapt to conventions more easily the more widely used they are - I’d steer away from making them fedi-specific.
At the risk of immediately making this post boring to anyone who isn’t a software developer …
As I was reminded recently when I proposed a convention around the use of a hashtag, it’s a well-established convention of hashtags that they’re a folksonomy. That doesn’t stop anyone from trying to standardise certain uses, but it’s worth asking; are hashtags the right tool for the job here? Maybe rather than giving musicians another job; tracking hashtag use and trying to use the rights ones, music app developers could figure out how to bake this stuff into their software?
I’m reminded of the Semantic Web vision; that data on the web can have metadata attached, enabling dumb software to know more about what kind of data it is, and do smarter things with it. The ActivityPub spec includes standard ways of doing this with Linked Data (“JSON-LD”), which fediverse devs have mostly ignored so far since it adds to their workload and they don’t yet see the benefits (an AP variant called LitePub was created specifically to strip out the use of Linked Data).
With some thoughtful use of JSON-LD in a federated music app like @bandwagon , musicians could be given tools to tell the app when a post is a release, a live show announcement, etc, and let the software determine how to put each post in front of the people who want to see it?
In the fediverse, there are no recommendation algorithms. At least not in the way there are on DataFarming platforms, where you need to regularly study the entrails of a goat to figure out how to get your posts in front of some eyeballs ; )
This is because these are the ones people are most likely to think of, when we try to search and follow tags. The more obscure the tag, the less likely it is anyone will think to search for it, and the less likely they are to get useful results if they do. So natural selection favours simple, generic tags.
That’s exactly what I do when I post on the fediverse about the music I’ve been enjoying. See this example from a couple of weeks ago. As you can see, I start the post with #Listening; that’s been a well-established tag in the fediverse since before Mastodon existed (there used to a federated group we could post to from GNU social using !Listening). At the bottom of the post, I add #music#genre#subgenre#ArtistName and if they’re not from the US, maybe a #country. If I find it hard to pidgeonhole the record by genre or subgenre, I just do my best to provide a couple of descriptive tags. Again, folksonomy.
Yes. it would be awesome to have a slightly more standardized way to categorize posts.
Apoligies, tech-speak incoming:
Unfortunately, we have lots of places to put information, but compatibility on the Fediverse is hard. The calculus is some version of “do I want my content to be a) expressive, or b) compatible with Mastodon?“
I ended up favoring Mastodon compatibility, which means making every JSON-LD document a “Note” or “Article”, regardless of whether it’s an album, event, or post. In theory you can multi-type items (I’m trying this on Events, now) but this causes it’s own compatibility issues.
I’d be up for an experiment of adding multiple types to albums. Funkwhale has published a vocabulary that might be a good place to start. I do want to work out federation with them at some point, so perhaps this is the kick in the pants that I need to make this work.
I have organized your list following the structure proposed above and I got this:
