Please note: The following is not intended as an attack on any of these awesome projects or the people behind them. It’s a Use eXperience story, intended to illustrate a series of points (see the Takeaway sections below).
As I mentioned it on the thread about discoverability, the main things I use BandCamp for are search and sample listening. Classic example, just now while doing a web search for something else, I stumbled on a debut album by a Canadian band called Penny Diving, via the homepage of the label releasing it;
I’d like to find out where I can listen to some of their songs, to see what I think of them. Normally I’d search for them on BandCamp (or YouTub), because it’s the place I most consistently get useful results. But as an experiments, let’s try listening another way.
Takeaway: Nobody ever pays for music we’ve never heard. Except maybe live, if we’re going with a friend who’s a big fan.
I look around the page for a listening post, or a link to one, but my attention gets hijacked by the colourful popup at bottom-right, trying to social engineer me into giving it my email address. Ick.
Takeaway: Don’t use Deceptive Patterns in your pages. Whether on your own band or label homepage, or on discovery platforms and other service portals. If want contact information, just straight up say so, and tell me exactly what you do and don’t intend to use it for.
At least the popup goes away when I click close, but the page still has no way for me to listen, just a bunch of ways to pay. But … why would I pay when I have no idea if I like the music yet?
Takeaway: Put a listening post in the place where the payment happens. Ideally create a flow from general info page > simple listening experience > payment invitation.
Given it’s basically just a vending machine with no products in it, how do I know it really represents the band, and that any payment I make here goes to them? For all I know if could be a scam site.
Takeaway: There needs to be a reliable and standardised way to link indentities with works online. Using 2-way rel-me links to connect social network accounts with homepages is useful. Of course that’s less necessary if you’re on FunkWhale or BandWagon, because your homepage is in a social network, the fediverse.
So I go try to look it up on FunkWhale. Nothing on open.audio, the flagship service. Is it worth trying others, which ones? No sign of a search bar on funkwhale.audio, am I meant to search FW from Mastodon? Try that, tumbleweeds. BandWagon.fm? Nope. Mirlo? Nada. OpenVerse.org? Zip. Jam.coop? Can’t see a search bar …
Takeaway When music on non-corporate hosting is fragmented across many, tiny services, which must be search individually, most of the results will be disappointing. Even as a determined supporter, this experience is not a replacement for a BandCamp or a Spotify. I need to be able to go to one of many music discovery portals, and get some kind of useful result most times, or I’ll stop coming back. Federated search is the way to do that.