I found this brief concept sketch in my notebook today. It’s a quirky idea and may not be practical. But done right, it could be a fun gimmick, and a way of drawing people back into in-person musical community.
Imagine a BandCamp-style app/ website that only plays music when you’re in a physical store. The store could be a record shop, a music venue, a hipster cafe, even a public library; any environment where people can sit around listening to music, or thinking about whether to buy it. It would bring people together in physical space, connecting us with each other, and potentially with the local music scene.
Being able to listen to music before you buy is a longstanding tradition. In the 1990s, record shops usually had ‘listening posts’. Where we would either listen to songs from a range of albums curated by the staff, and changed up regularly, or choose an album from the racks to listen to. As music sales went online, sites like BandCamp replicated this by allowing us to listen from home, and as mobile internet proliferated, from anywhere. But it also allowed us to do something shop-based listening didn’t; listen to the music as if we’d bought a copy.
This created a situation where the online stores with deep enough pockets to be the world’s unpaid jukebox (eg BandCamp, YouTub), came to dominate online music sales. If people can search, listen and buy with all the convenience of a BandCamp, but only at a specific physical places(s), except for music they’ve paid for, it might make purchases much more likely. It could also make browsing and buying music a much more social experience.
The infrastructure could look like one app, connected to one set of servers, that can be used in a range of participating locations; record shops, live music venues, hipster cafes, even public libraries. Revenue sharing could be worked out between musicians and their crews, the businesses hosting the participating store locations, and the app coding and server hosting teams. The whole thing could be structured as a multi-stakeholder platform cooperative.