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?)
For me the most important criterias are:
I personally don’t care for streaming.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
Like ‘email’, this noun doesn’t need an ‘s’.
Right about criteria, wrong about emails.