Random idea for an in-person media store app

General
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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.

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This is a fantastic idea!!

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Also found this from 2009 - there’s a few from around that time: Soundtrckr Is Spot-On, Like a Location-Aware Pandora | WIRED

Particularly interesting for the quote:

Adding location awareness to social music streaming, already a rare strong suit for music startups, will make them even more potent by giving listeners another efficient way to discover music – and each other. And this time around, it matters where you are.

Notice that someone started an app called MySoundtrack! a few years ago too and mentioned it on Reddit, which allowed people to tag locations with their own music but not to discover something new in a real world location. :thinking:

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Wow, I’d never heard of Soundtrckr! Along similar lines, FreeSound have a music map on their site;

Goes to show that (as with so many things) most of the technical plumbing for location-aware music services has existed for more than a decade. The challenge is to design a satisfying UX, and get enough buy-in from artists and intermediaries to make the business logistics work.

But although I wrote the original concept sketch as an idea for a whole service, it could also be an optional feature. Made available to artists using existing services like @bandwagon or Mirlo.

Imagine, for example, you drop a pre-release of your new album on a hosting service. But can only be accessed on your device when you’re at your local ‘music hub’. Or you stream a live-to-air where you play the whole album live. But the stream can only be accessed during listening parties at the music hub.

Again, the music hub (music embassy?) could be a record shop, live venue, public library, etc. But the idea is that there’s one at a time per neighborhood, so it creates opportunities for community building through shared musical interests.

In the context of what Ben, @simon and others are doing with the ‘musicverse’ (so to speak), Evan P has done some experiments with geolocating ActivityPub data (see places.pub), which could maybe be adapted to location-aware music hosting features.

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This is an interesting concept, and a good use of “geo-tracking.” I’m a little hesitant to track users’ locations, but I’ll bet we could figure out a way to do it.

The starting point might be to establish a working partnership with ONE local shop, and work with them to tweak something that makes sense. The “carrot” would be some kind of exclusive arrangement for music that they couldn’t offer people otherwise. But again, boots on the ground are best for determining what would/wouldn’t work.

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Good point, the whole scheme would need some careful, privacy-protecting UX design.

So, run a pilot with a music shop or venue willing to be a guinea pig, and use that to test the concept, and experiment with the tech. I love this idea! I’m friendly with the crew at Nivara Lounge, and I reckon they’d be keen. Maybe we could tie it in with Synth Obscura somehow?