An open source, self-hostable music platform will soon allow people on the Fediverse to buy music and support artists. Here’s why it’s a big deal.
An open source, self-hostable music platform will soon allow people on the Fediverse to buy music and support artists. Here’s why it’s a big deal.
I wouldn’t say it’s a bargain for the artist when there’s plenty of services that offer that for free.
From a purely money perspective a small artist would probably lose money here while it may earn money in places like Tidal, which have much more audience.
Let’s not lie people. It’s not a bargain. $10 a month is a lot for that service. Maybe from a “San Francisco” or other rich American city that is Pocket change, but from most of the world $10 a month is a considerable expense.
Other thing is if you want to morally support ot because you really like that model for whatever reason.
To be honest, I don’t much see the point. Of you are going for the complicated route (aka not using established platforms) are you are even considering self hosting, putting out your own website to sell music is easier and cheaper. And it’s actually very common for artists to have their own website. You can find static hosting for a few bucks.
The world’s income per capita is around $10000 a year. In South Europe is 25k€/year. In Northern Europe, 55k€/year. In the United States, $80k/year.
120 dollars per year is 0.5 percent of the income of the average citizen living in the (relatively) poorer part of developed world. That means that are plenty of people who can afford it, and it’s not just the top of the top.
You have to think about disposable income, after taxes, rent/housing, food and all other essential services.
This is a leisure/personal project expense. And the disposable income for that tend to be 30% of net income at most.
It would be more like a 2%. Which may not sound like much. But it’s same as saying you can do 50 things a year and this is one of those 50 things.
Anyway, I still think that price tag is too much, I don’t think there would be a lot of people really willing to spend that for a service others provide for free with a bigger platform, or that you can do it by yourself cheaper if you want to go to an alternative route.
Once again I think it fits a spot only for alternative rich people.
TANSTAAFL. If people refuse to understand this very basic principle and if we don’t collectively start putting our own resources on the line to invest in ethical alternatives, we will never be able to have a sustainable alternative that is not dependent on Venture Capitalists. Everything wrong with Surveillance Capitalism can be traced back to the point where people started expecting to get things for free when they should be asking themselves “What is the catch?”.
But there is free lunch.
That argument I’ve seen it used precisely by adventure capitalist targeting rich alternative people to guilt trip them into their services. When those services could perfectly be free or cheaper without relying in big enterprises.
For this instance, instead of making some people rich by paying music hosting services a p2p network could be offered. If I would me making music I would 100% just offer it by torrent and be done with hosting costs.
Other of my favorite examples is Kagi search engine, which has used this same tactic to convince a lot of people to pay for something that is the same as a self hosted searxng instance.
Hosting the files is the least of the problems. Accepting payments online is. Dealing with fraud is. Managing exclusive access and features for paying customer is. Getting one place where you can point your fans to go and buy your music or merch is.
How is that free? Even if you are self-hosting, you still need to pay for your server, the electricity to run it and your time that you spend troubleshooting, making sure things are up-to-date, etc. Not to mention that you are also not accounting the labor of the developers of libre projects: FOSS does not grow in trees, they require people working for it as well.
I know plenty of small groups with their own webpage dealing with most of that. It’s not that big of a deal.
I selfhost my own searxng, both labor and electricity cost are so small they are negligible.
My point is that if I am to be in al “alternative” economy is not to make rich a cool San Francisco dude instead of Jeff Bezos, is to not make rich anyone at my expenses. When I ask for something different I do not ask for making rich different people, I ask for a system that does not make rich anyone.
For instance Lemmy. Lemmy does not ask for subscriptions nor have ads. Voluntary donations are more than enough to keep it on float. Other people like Kagi CEO or some other CEOs like that would ask a subscription fee for lemmy and guilt trip people into thinking it’s necessary, when it’s not.
That is the perfect display of crab mentality that is so prevalent in the Fediverse.
We’re talking about one guy that is building a service that is 100% FOSS, and who currently has (according to the article) 300 musicians on the platform. Even if them all become paying subscribers, we are talking about something on the order of $3000/month. No one is going to become a “rich dude in San Francisco” because of that.
Even if he gets 10 times as many people paying, we are still talking about income that is less than what a senior developer would be making by slinging code at Big Tech. And if he got to the point where there that many people using his service, you can bet that would also mean more competition in the space. With the difference that no one would be able to build a monopoly around it because the service is FOSS and built on top of open protocols.
“Keeping it afloat” is not the same as “thriving”. The Lemmy developers have made this their full-time job, but they could be making more money by doing deliveries by bike than what they get by donations. This is pathetically little for all the value that they have produced. There is so much potential in the Fediverse, yet we don’t get to realize 1% of it because people like you keep this silly idea that an “alternative” economy is only fair if everyone is piss-poor broken.