Public Playlists by Mirlo

Projects Mirlo
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Last week, Bandcamp released a new feature that has been anticipated for a long time: publicly sharable playlists. We still listen to a lot of our music on Bandcamp, so it's exciting so see such a useful feature that listeners there have been asking about for years finally available. But we also understand why it's been such a long time coming: like many problems facing online music software, the issues are not technical but social and legal ones.

The ability to play music as streams on Bandcamp hinges entirely on sidestepping the complex royalty systems that govern streaming platforms. As best as we understand, by limiting streams to "preview listens" of purchased music, they’ve long avoided paying performance royalties to PROs (Performance Rights Organizations) like ASCAP, BMI, or PRS. The new playlist feature—restricted to music you’ve bought—is a carefully calculated move. Once music appears in user-generated playlists, it risks being classified as a "diffusion channel," which could trigger PRO licensing requirements. Bandcamp’s legal team has likely scrutinized this to ensure they don’t cross the line; instead, they are dancing nimbly on the edge of a loophole.

The distinction between "promotional listens" and curated playlists is legally murky. PROs treat playlists as potential "compilation albums," meaning the music’s context shifts from artist intent to third-party curation. By mirroring Funkwhale's approach—where users share digital music they own—Bandcamp uses a gray area that might shield them from PRO battles. And of course, encouraging fans to build and share mix tapes of music they've bought is a clever way of encouraging music sales while keeping fans in the Bandcamp ecosystem, rather than using existing third party Bandcamp playlists like bndcmpr.co.

Of course, as a group of people building something that's currently positions itself as a competitor to Bandcamp, and with our stab at public playlists released last week, we were also a bit surprised. This is the first major feature that Bandcamp has released since its purchase by Songtradr after what feels like a year of rewriting their terms and conditions. Before this release, we shared the sentiment of many that while Bandcamp currently works pretty great for musicians, they had also become stagnant. We'll see if these new feature releases will continue.

In the meantime, we can celebrate some of the things we've been working on ourselves. 

We've also rolled out our own iteration on public playlists—we hope that people will take advantage of building narrative blog posts around them. Now, you can add songs to a blog post and it will all be playable on the blog post page itself. You can try it out on the this blog post's own page!

At the end of May we helped organize an event in DC that brought together musicians and the solidarity economy. The folks at KiaZii did most of the heavy lifting and the event itself was a blast, regenerative and a mini-verse of the world we'd like to see. We're really excited about doing more work with them in the future.

We've also released a whole host of new features over the past few months, from adding tracks to your list of favorites and purchasing them, the ability to upload music without letting people download it, tour dates, to the ability to set your own platform cut on subscriptions. Lastly, we are focusing our current development on label features and looking for a few brave souls to test them out. If you or your label want to participate, e-mail us at hi@mirlo.space.

Have thoughts? Join the discussion on the Social Music Network.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/302
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Gah I’m so chuffed about how those songs appeared in that post here. Totally unexpected and I don’t know why it works because it doesn’t work if I embed a song with a link. I guess it grabs the iframe just like the post itself does.

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A new English word I’ve learned. :sweat_smile:

Yes, here the forum software just interprets the HTML code coming from the RSS feed:

<p></p>
<iframe width="700" height="137" class="remirror-iframe remirror-iframe-custom" src="https://mirlo.space/widget/track/3162" data-embed-type="custom" allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0"></iframe>
<p></p>
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It’s for when “pleased” just doesn’t quite capture how pleased you are.

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@simon This is a link to nowhere, also in the original blog post. Call me intrigued.

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Fixed in the original!

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Ok, but then
 it’s still not possible to offer an actual playlist in Mirlo that allows someone to press play and listen to all the songs in one go, right?

Say I want to create a “fitness” playlist in Mirlo, listen to it while I’m on a static bike sweating like crazy, and I also want to share it with others. Is this somewhere in the roadmap?

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If you go to this blog post and click on the big play button right underneath the header it’ll play all the songs in the blog post in order.

If you just wanted to add songs to the blog post and not any text, you could do that, though we hope people will write more around the songs they’re sharing.

An improvement to make it more obvious is we could also have a little playlist at the bottom of the blog post that shows them all in order with a play button.

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:exploding_head:

Ok, I had missed this. Great! Having a blog post that is a playlist is a very good idea. Indeed, it is very good to have the possibility but not the obligation to add context to each track.

After playing with this new feature a bit, there is one improvement that would make this a playlist-playlist in its full sense: pressing the random button in the player and then next doesn’t seem to work. I keep getting the songs in the same sequence as they are posted.

Keeping the example of the “fitness” playlist (or any playlist that you may want to listen to regularly, with dozens of songs from which you listen a few each time), random plays are important.

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Have you got any way to prevent someone from publishing a blog post with only tracks listed and no text or rather very few text to wrap them up together ?
I’m no lawyer but it might be a sbtelty around which you could get attacked :thinking:

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We don’t, and it’s a complex matter honestly because I think doing so would be limiting the feature a bit too much. The way I see Mirlo, it’s a perpetual exploration / experimentation. For now, we don’t have (and are not seeking to have) any deals with editors and massive catalogues, we’re really closer to what Bandcamp used to look like 10+ years ago, so I think it’s still relatively fine in that we’re dealing with single artists that can authorize use of their music one by one (this doesn’t change much conceptually actually but it does change the power dynamic at play). If we were to start onboarding bigger structures (say big distributors), it would quickly become an issue once more and we’d likely need to adjust how we deal with this. But it wouldn’t be the only issue, onboarding big distributors is almost an other job entirely, on many levels, and it’s often the part where a lot of things break. To my knowledge, only Bandcamp has managed so far to succesfully switch from a pretty grassroot DIY system to a platform that has tons of massive labels on it, and they had corporate fundings to back that growth.

Part of experimenting with alternative models means this is definitely “not the end” of us exploring what could happen with “the concept of sharing tracks”. What Bandcamp just proposed with “share tracks you bought” is a very interesting spin on the matter that I think is both clever and well played since it happens at a moment where a lot of music enthusiast have a huge catalogue of tracks they’re just sitting on because they don’t really need Bandcamp to listen to it. Now they have something they can do with it.

This is not a situation any of the competing platforms are in at the moment, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other options to explore. As clever as I said Bandcamp’s approach was, it doesn’t come without its own flaws either. I hope we’ll try to similarly come up with ways where tracks played on Mirlo can generate revenue for artists without it meaning that we’re locking a feature like “playlist” behind purchasing power from listeners (ie. the richest people can afford to make more playlists than those who can’t pay for music). The way I view the whole music ecosystem at this point and the value exchange within it, is that it’s almost entirely donation based, having fixed value doesn’t have much sense anymore, and people who buy on Bandcamp mostly “buy to support” not to listen, so if I had to explore avenues, it would be around the concepts of donation based streaming, where everyone pays according to their capacity, which would alleviate some of the weird disparities you can have when a fixed price means very different things in different countries and to different social class of people. But that’s just a personal idea I have and I’m sure we could explore more.

Implementing and thinking through all this without breaking anything is a tall order though, ultimately right now, what we want is to help with outreach for artists on Mirlo so that listeners can start showcasing what they love to others through simple means. At the moment I think this is what the blog tracks feature will allow to do. We’ve consciously mimicked the way it looks to Bandcamp Daily, the point here being : We don’t want to curate ourselves and gatekeep who gets showcased or not, we want our listeners to do that as a community and we want the music on Mirlo to circulate.

One last important point I think is that whenever anything’s playing on Mirlo there’s a tip button for the currently playing track that makes it dead easy to support anyone in a heartbeat, but also makes it clear that support is needed and that music has value, I think that’s a big conceptual/UI difference with the way other streaming services work (even Bandcamp in that regard kind of denies the “donation” based nature of the service and prefers to obfuscate it behind the relationship of the shop / purchase paradigm).

All this to say, we’ll see how all of this goes, and we keep thinking about it all! I think these discussions are great and essential and I’m hopeful experimenting around these concepts with a community of open folks like the ones we have on Mirlo / Jam / Bandwagon etc. can help us shape another kind of relationship between artists and listeners.

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