Now that Bandcamp has had huge layoffs, what about an opensource, Fediverse-friendly replacement? What can a FOSS product bring to the community and do better than Bandcamp?

  • Discoverability?
  • Broader selection of payments platforms? Direct transfer to avoid processors? (I’m ignorant about the processing system, plus international considerations)
  • Ease of spinning up (SaaS?)
  • Content deliverability (on the fly transcode from sourced FLAC or WAVs? Rich video/multi track audio?)
  • SynapseEnglish
    38•8 months ago

    For me the most important criterias are:

    • ownership: I buy, I get to download (re-download) the files and use then how ever I please
    • astists get a fair share: I want to maximize the share of the money I’ve spent going to the artists, and I would like the platform to be transparent, showing me with each purchase how much goes to the artitst for creating more art (if self-hosted by the artist herself/himself, this cost is then deduced)

    I personally don’t care for streaming.

    • fmstratEnglish
      3•8 months ago

      I would challenge “unlimited” re-download in a FOSS market. This puts the long-term hosting on the market, vs the user, and is a challenge for current platforms. Perhaps re-download for a time, and of course DRM free is the key.

      • @JonEFive@midwest.socialEnglish
        4•8 months ago

        Man, it’s like the good old days of buying physical media. You lose or scratch your CD, you don’t get a new one for free.

        • @thisisawayoflife@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1•8 months ago

          Yeah, I feel like there needs to be a solution to this. Thankfully, artists don’t generally have hugely enormous catalogs that would take up terabytes of space (my entire collection is less than 400GB, which is many, many times larger than any single recording artists catalog, even the Beatles).

          One rub I have with limited downloads is that memory of broken CDs. I bought a mobile app that is about $200 and they limit the number of times you can request are-download before you have to buy another license and I think it’s messed up. I’ve had to store that APK on multiple flash drives, off-site, etc.

    • @thisisawayoflife@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      I would challenge your definition of streaming. I host all my own music and I stream it all the time via Airsonic-advanced (though it does get cached - and it’s constantly downloading new podcast episodes). For me it’s just the level of accessibility I consider as “streaming”.