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Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

subvert.fm

91–100 of 140 posts

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#91
The burning question I have is:

Why do artists feel the need for a platform?

The tools are out there to allow you to advertise, sell and distribute your music (I'm not talking about the distribution platforms like distrokid etc, fuck streaming, fuck social media and fuck making content whilst we're at it), why give away control over your art?

My model is this:

* Make some awesome music

* Self host it. Provide means for people to download your music (there are so many methods).

* Allow donations via reputable method

* Crowd fund for big events like creating physical releases, paying for studio time if you need to.

* Play as many gigs as you can/want to do

* Again fuck social media

You have to be dogged and self determined to work hard in order to for your art to be good, once you put the work in and get yourself out there people will want to hear more after seeing your shows.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#92

Listeners want the convenience of Spotify and don’t care about artists or even know what Bandcamp is, let alone something after Bandcamp. I’m an indie artist and I want things to be different but until you convince people to give up convenience for principles, projects like this won’t mean much.

Let the shit music exist on Spotify, if you value your take control of it, throwing it into the void and prostrating yourself on social media begging people to listen to it is not doing yourself or your art justice!

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#93

I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre. Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the…

What's wrong with discovering good art out of random luck?

I have discovered at least as much good music on Bandcamp as I did in the early years of Beatport and before that in real-life record stores. You start with a genre you like, then just flick through all the new releases. If a cover or title catches your eye, pop it in and have a listen, if you don't like it, move on to the next. Maybe you missed a bunch of good stuff because it didn't catch your eye, but who cares? The point isn't to collect every amazing piece of music ever written, it's just to buy enough music that makes you happy.

After a while you might start to build up a mental map of which labels tend to release more stuff you like so you prioritize listening to their new releases over other labels. Or you find an artist you like and follow them onto different labels. Even indie artists who self-release everything often still do collabs with other artists, so you can find connected/related stuff that way too, or look at the way they self-describe and tag their own music then search round for those keywords too.

In my opinion it's much easier to discover music now than it was in the brick and mortar days primarily because of hyperlinks and search, but also because the new releases rack doesn't get cleaned out by the early birds, records aren't held behind the counter for favorite customers etc. Not to mention Discogs is still there for more mainstream stuff to drill down on aliases, guest appearances, producers etc. Every Bandcamp Friday I end up with a full cart and dozens of open tabs and it feels like an embarrassment of riches. I wouldn't know what to do with a recommendations engine on top of that.

I am thrilled with my music collection these days, it's got everything from janky noodlings by bedroom musicians who I was perhaps the only person who they ever got a sale from, to established artists with a couple decades of releases under their belts, to weird little microscenes centered around cities or countries I'll never visit. Sure, I dug through a ton of trash to get there, sometimes checking out reams of tracks by a promising artist only to find a single gem worth tossing over a few bucks for, but now I have it, and I treasure it! I love having a personalized collection that's entirely made up of tunes that I think are awesome. It's the fulfillment of teenage me's dream. I don't think discovering 10x as much music would make it any better - on the contrary, I wouldn't have time to really focus on and appreciate it all, in which case I might as well have just put a streaming playlist on in the background.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it have a single point of control that will attract corruption if enough of us start using it? By opposition to crypto, which attracts distributed corruption when enough people use the project? I'm being glib, but complaining that a project not using crypto makes it inherently unsafe is pretty rich.

It's not really a complaint about the project itself. I'm actually considering paying the $100 to be a member because I think they're attempting to address an important problem and I want to see how it goes and it would probably be more fun to do so as an owner. But you've got to admit that its a peculiar rhetorical choice to explain at the landing page that your strategy doesn't involve coupling ownership/control of…

I for one would stay away 100 feet from any project that remotely alludes to being vaguely interested in crypto/blockchain. So not doing that is a huge green flag for me.

Haven’t yet seen and canola where this crypto distributed network actually had benefits and wasn’t just a giant grift - to be fair I did not look very hard though.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#95
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it possible to host a website almost on blockchain (see TON Sites as example) and withdraw certain modification permissions once the contract in launched. It seems to me that it is possible to implement fully decentralized bandcamp-like site.

I’ve yet to see any useful product built on top of crypto. Can you name any ? (Not including things that just make early adopters rich or simply provide services to other crypto related projects).

Any day now!

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#96
post #70
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a self-learning music discovery engine called Gnoosic: https://www.gnoosic.com I can confirm that when you suggest a random band to a random user, they will dislike it with over 90% probability. I'd be interested to hear how well Gnoosic works for your musical taste.

Band level doesn't quite work. Alas, it needs to be track level. There are a lot of bands where I like a track and that's it. My favorite example is Seven Sirens And a Silver Tear from Sirenia, a Norwegian gothic metal band. There's no metal in that. It took me a long long time before I learned this but the track is a direct descendant of the Midlight Sonata. And I was hunting for similar songs and I now keep a playl…

This. There are many, many artists who I only own one or two tracks of - including some of the most-played tracks in my collection - because the vast majority of their other output is not my taste at all. If finding good music was as simple as just buying everything that a single artist put out, it would be much easier to build a collection.

The good news is that in the digital era you no longer need to fork over cash for an entire album or even an EP when you only care about one of the songs - which leaves more money available to buy music from other artists. I often wonder if in the long run it still balances out for artists, since the songs one person likes probably aren't the same as the songs another person likes, especially in niche genres.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#97
post #30
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the failure rate for crypto organizations is much higher than the average org.

centralization is easy

>the reason all crypto companies are scams and corrupt is just because the problem is so hard, not because of inherent flaws in the idea and the incompatibility of lofty goals with reality.

I’m all for decentralisation but blockchain ain’t it.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#98
Really exciting to see this manifesto.

There's already some existing co-operative music store/bandcamp alternative projects that are selling music and accepting new artists.

https://jam.coop is the one we are building. We launched last year in response to the sale of bandcamp and the uncertainty we felt in our communities of musicians who depend on Bandcamp for some or part of their living. In contrast to subvert we've decided to take an incremental approach. We're incubating jam inside an existing worker co-operative, building the features that our users need, and working towards an "exit to community" where jam will become a multi-stakeholder co-op owned by artists and workers.

I'm also familiar with mirlo and ampwall who are working on similar projects.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really a complaint about the project itself. I'm actually considering paying the $100 to be a member because I think they're attempting to address an important problem and I want to see how it goes and it would probably be more fun to do so as an owner. But you've got to admit that its a peculiar rhetorical choice to explain at the landing page that your strategy doesn't involve coupling ownership/control of…

It does the normal thing instead: using a legal system to define and enforce ownership and control.

There's no "legal system", there's a huge bunch of local legal systems, most of them slightly broken in various ways.

Re: Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

#100
post #26

I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre. Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the…

I run a self-learning music discovery engine called Gnoosic: https://www.gnoosic.com I can confirm that when you suggest a random band to a random user, they will dislike it with over 90% probability. I'd be interested to hear how well Gnoosic works for your musical taste.

I tried it before, and I just tried it again. It is great. I just came back from RecSys a large conference on recommender systems. Researchers and companies like Spotify, Amazon music, Deezer gave lots of presentation. However, nothing they showed were so immediately useful as this. Awesome service!
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