Nuclear: Desktop music player focused on streaming from free sources

…HDDs?

This kind of unconventional approach to receiving feedback on your product is relatively common in the field of open-source-development-of-software-the-MPAA/MIAA-would-disapprove-of. In fact I'd imagine it's often part & parcel of being thick skinned enough to persevere.

> This plays music from sources that did have a right to give you a copy (e.g. youtube).

The distinction being that any random copy of something on YouTube might be there not because the rightsholder explicitly wants it there, but merely because the rightsholder 1. doesn't work with a big label that participates in the YouTube DMCA content fingerprinting program, and 2. doesn't have the resources to stay on top of every unauthorized upload of their work on their own (or perhaps doesn't even have awareness that anyone is doing such.)

In other words, while YouTube Music (the music and music-video hosting and proxied-leadgen service) is essentially as authorized as MTV, YouTube (the user video hosting service, where a video might just so happen to be music + a static screen/lyrics) is a definite "grey market" for music. There's plenty of legit music there (e.g. live performances by the musicians themselves) but also plenty of freebooted content (...of mostly non-RIAA musicians, sure; but what of it?)

And in my mind, that makes YouTube (again, not YT Music, YT-the-video-host — yes, they're collapsed together at the UI level, but crucially, not at the API level!) not really any different from your average BT tracker, in terms of its ability to guarantee authorized-ness of what it hosts; which is why I think the comparison between "an app that plays videos it finds on torrent trackers" (Popcorn Time) and "an app that plays music it finds on YouTube" (Nuclear) is valud.

It's completely understandable not just for the usual streaming services (like youtube, etc.) and the grievances there (payouts per play, whichever way it goes, be it that artists getting stiffed or people refusing to come up with even a fraction of a cent), but for something like bandcamp as well, which is kind of 'almost but not quite a streaming service' and more accurately described in a literal way like 'it lets you play music and buy it', from which apps like this just remove the 'buying music' portion completely.

For something like youtube, there's hardly any qualms whether it's ethical or exploitative to sidestep that whole thing and whatever else artists may put out around their music (even something like links in video descriptions), because it is just a mess and people just roll with it anyway. But for bandcamp it leans a bit more towards 'taking it for a ride', when an app like this completely removes the aspect of buying music. Perhaps some people might not even get a slightest clue that's even possible cause there is just no such suggestion in the app at all. And if you wanted to get there, it kind of makes it harder to do so, because there's no prominent links to the original pages of songs and albums in the app. Finding or copying a link is a bit non-trivial because there's no such option in album view or track items, there is in playing queue but it's also kinda buried there.

It's just the way that something like this completely obscures the fact that you could buy music from bandcamp, or sometimes even download it for free (depending on what artists have set up). It's one of the better platforms for artists, so it's kind of odd to see this 'fuck you got mine' approach to it. It's also kind of just crummy and shoddily made, so even bandcamp webpages seem like a better browsing and listening experience. Bandcamp website isn't the worst for finding and playing music (it may be plain but it's snappy, and their discovery tools are pretty nice), but it's remarkable to make something that works even worse, perhaps just because bandcamp doesn't even have that much going on.

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