If a musician wants to distribute an album or a song to all the main corporate platforms, they can do so with a single click (almost) and for a small fee. What would it take to distribute music to the main social platforms with a single click (almost)?
Hmm I could see a platform like mirlo importing releases from a faircamp RSS feed. Platforms could syndicate / sync / repost content over activitypub, but I think that would be redundant since part of the point of AP is that users can follow activity across different platforms without creators needing to be everywhere all the time.
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It would takeā¦ someone to make the button!
As hackery types, itās easy for us to see as āsimpleā the things weāve already developed intuitions about. But Faircamp is command-line only, RSS and ActivityPub are machine-to-machine protocolsā¦ They work great! But thereās no on-ramp!
OTOH, with all the frameworks and toolkits effluviating from Big Tech, any junior front-end developer can make a web page with a drag-and-drop area where users can drag a bunch of songs, edit metadata, click āpublishā and feed that into ā¦ say an API endpoint which shells out to a cloud function running Faircamp and feeding the outputs to ā¦ say a rsync or FTP client that uploads the resulting static page, RSS and all ā¦ done?
(Iām saying web page because building and distributing native GUI apps across the requisite minimum of 3 desktop and 2 mobile platforms is somewhere between a nightmare and a hell. But maybe what truly needs to be built isā¦ an iOS app? And this is where many anarchist hackers, me included, would just say āewā, and thatās that. While the iOS dev doing Pixelfed gets hated on for some aspect of his attitude which, obnoxious or not, should rather be seen as secondary to his labor capacity imo.)
So, why hasnāt anyone built that button (well, form) already? Someone better than me about āpeople thingsā might have a better answer. My guess is, basically, lack of cultural overlap, and a self-selection effect:
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people who care about independent music publishing are more likely to be able to accomplish this independently - by learning the existing tools, without needing, or indeed being able to, make it any easier for another (they may also be proud of their independence, and protecting their skills against devaluation, or against use by those with incompatible values)
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people who care about making things easier are less likely to care about the āindependentā part; people who have the skills to build, say, a Spotify lookalike, just get hired by Spotify, or if theyāre not within hiring range then by some business that will attempt to build a Spotify clone, poorly, and fail (but in the mean time still pay salaries and burn workers out); you mightāve noticed that for a lot of builders their building skills are their primary lifeline, but a lot of these skills are contingent on capitalism, so their entire labor capacity goes towards survival
The technical capacity is absolutely there. (IIRC DistroKid started out as 1 guy and a bunch of scripts?) But what, in your opinion, would be the direct motivating incentives to channel that capacity towards a tool for maximally simplified independent distribution?
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Weāve had this discussion before, in Beyond Faircamp - I have given it a bit of thought. The protocol that Ben Pate has developed for @bandwagon to talk to The Indie Beat Radio is potentially a starting point - or someone mentioned there is a commercial protocol already used by the big streamers.
If all the indie sites (Mirlo et al) agreed, then the first step is for:
- Music providers (e.g. Bandwagon, Mirlo) to implement an exporter/sender
- Music consumers (e.g. radio stations, podcasts etc) to implement an importer/receiver
Then you could just allow each individual provider to create their own relationship with each potential consumer - but that obviously could get complicated.
Or, you could set up a middle-man distribution layer which acts like a consumer to the providers, and a provider to the consumers. Each provider only has to export once, each consumer only has to import once. Consumers and Providers can select who they communicate with. But, this needs someone to write and maintain this separate service, as it only exists in my head at the moment! Kind of like a Fairdistrokid I guess.
Faircamp is a slightly different case - someone would have to implement a āfetcherā for Faircamp content, as it canāt directly export anything itself. But the mythical non-existent distribution service could potentially do that as well - then Faircamp artists could register their site with the distributor and everything from then on would be handled automatically. Maybe. With unicorns and faeries.
In this model thereās nothing stopping a site from being both a provider and a consumer - so I could publish to Mirlo and have my content pushed to Bandwagon, for example, as well as consumer-only sites like TIBR.
Thereās nothing stopping multiple people from setting up such distribution hubs, although youād have to have individual relationships with a critical mass of providers and consumers to make it work.
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13 posts were split to a new topic: A music aggregator of multiple ethical sources
For what is worth, as the person who started this topic, Iām lost and not understanding whether you are still discussing āSocial music distribution in one click?ā. If you are, great, donāt mind me. Anything bringing progress to the answers is good. 
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Pitching in here to say that Mirlo has an API key set up so that anyone who wants to could push albums to Mirloās API (say if you were building a project on Faircamp, and wanted to upload those files to Mirlo in the same process). Just DM me for getting you set up.
I was thinking yesterday how easy itād be to do what @unspeaker suggests in their first response on this thread by just pulling the uploader content out of Mirlo and setting it up as its own app. The main thing to do then is to either implement DDEX (an existing standard for distributing music), or send it to bandwagon and IndieBeat as well.
The main issue that I foresee with this distribution method is payouts.
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Yeah I was idly thinking about this yesterday - any centralised distribution system would either have to leave all the commercial operations to each individual consumer/provider, or would have to manage the cash flow between them all, which could get pretty complex.
I guess this is why the commercial distributors (Distrokid et al) create a direct relationship with the artist for distributing royalties?
Then youāve got ISRC codes and licensing organisations etc to deal with, could get complex.
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I didnāt know DDEX. Interesting as a document, but what i gather from a peek is that it is modeled after the old paradigm, where the central entities are Record Companies, IP societies and distributors.
Cool members: Current Members - DDEX
It may be compatible with decentralized distribution, but it looks unlikely to be compatible with a decentralized value flow. Typical corporate approach: distribute the cost, centralize the value.
I know no one wants to look at this because it has a bad rep, but when it comes to distribution methods of payouts, podcast2 is there already.
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Do you have a link for podcast2? A quick search only shows me āyou too can make lots of money from podcast, be like joe roganā style blog posts 
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Lovely!
LMWSFY: https://podcasting2.org/
edit: as far as i can tell, joe rogan is not using podacast2. He could though, itās an open protocol
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A quick search only shows me āyou too can make lots of money from podcast, be like joe roganā style blog posts
This is why itās impossible to talk about this tech. But iām going to go out on limb, be me and just fuggen do it. Itās interesting, because if i look at the about page of Mirol, the pricing section is bigger than the feature section: Mirlo
Clearly, remuneration is the center of the issue of independence: we have distribution. Decentralized, federated, centralizedā¦ all the flavours already exist. What we donāt have are fair and peer-to-peer methods of paymentā¦ or donāt we?
I very much believe none of the new platforms will help us achieve a fair music-market. The only thing that could actually help to get there is the political leverage to create a fair market-market. Meanwhile, what is the alternative to Bitcoin? Paypal and elon muskās gang? Federal reserve? Central banking?
I get that the cyrpto-bro scene is ces pool of hilarious but nefarious retards. I get that Bitcoin is imperfect. I donāt get the arguments against it like āboiling seasā or āpyramid schemesā. All i read are either social issues tied to money regardless of form. Or things everyone is riding along because itās a cheap and easy bash, and fact checking is boring.
I donāt think podcast2 will save us, but thatās where iām going for now. Might be a waste of time. Weāll see. What turned out to be a waste of time every single time, was to embark on a platform where iām not custodial of my identity, my routing and my content. And that control is pretty much what this gives me.
There is still no 1 button system. But Boot Start9 on an old PC giving you an http server, a lightning node and a newsletter at the click of 3 buttons, and pifapafpouf: iām good to go happily pay my taxes.
Is any of all the things going to make me rich? no.
Will i be able to live of my music because i do it the fair way? no.
While we organize to change the whole fuggen system, iāll go do the things that seem good to me.
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Itās interesting, because if i look at the about page of Mirol, the pricing section is bigger than the feature section
I mean, the features section is listed first and links to an entire page that lists features in detail. Similarly, on our front page, we list features first, and then the about section. But sure, there are more words under the pricing section on the about page. This feels like a funny snipe to me to be honest.
But yes, point taken, Mirlo is built with the intent to put money into the pockets of musicians. Itās also an incomplete project.
And yes, Mirlo works under the premise of a global market where musicians compete with each other (something I talked a bit more about here). And yes, most musicians will not want to go through the hassle of setting up some arcane technical incantation to get paid. And yes, most musicians actually will be working with PROs, who will work with DDEX. And I donāt know how much most musicians care about tackling the global capitalist system.
There are contradictions here we have to grapple with as we organize for an alternative, and it means we have to be explicit and careful in what story we tell, how we tell, and who we tell it to. It also means, to me, that we canāt just decide not to do things because itās not the most pure way of doing things.
I donāt get the arguments against it like āboiling seas.ā
Why is it an invalid argument that proof of work crypto (bitcoin) has the well documented carbon footprint of a small wealthy European country? Also, as long as itās being primarily traded on exchanges to make money, itās all about finding the next sucker to buy it from you, which 
I donāt think podcast2 will save us, but thatās where iām going for now
I know no one wants to look at this because it has a bad rep, but when it comes to distribution methods of payouts, podcast2 is there already.
Whatās the bad rep?
Anyways, all of that aside, I salute you for wanting to completely control the process of how you make money from your music, and that you have the gumption and time to do so! I am genuinely looking forward to see how you build it!
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Thank you! Iāll keep you posted!
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Interesting post on Tiktok on interoperability. Iāve created a post on my blog with the video. Itās time to act to take back our internet. And the internet used to be a place where individuals interacted, not owned by a few large corporations who gatekeep the interactions. See the post at https://jaypeachproductions.com