cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41807814
Before anyone says it: yes, I know about Funkwhale.
Funkwhale is great, but what I’m imagining is slightly different.
I’m not just talking about a platform where users upload their own music, but something closer to how YouTube Music actually works. Artists would upload their own music and videos, either to a shared instance or to their own instance, and listeners could then stream them across the fediverse.
Something similar to how Peertube, Lemmy, Pixelfed, Mastodon, etc work.
One of the big appeals of YouTube Music (at least IMO) is that since it runs off YouTube, you get an absolutely wild mix of content. Official tracks, obscure uploads, forgotten demos, weird one-off videos, hyper-niche stuff that would never exist on Spotify or Apple Music.
The closest alternative to it would be SoundCloud, but even then, SC is more underground music scene.
In theory, I could imagine a potential federated alternative that hooks into PeerTube. Maybe users log in with their PeerTube account or instance, and music-focused instances federate with video-focused ones.
Something like “PeerTube Music” or a dedicated ActivityPub music service that interoperates with PeerTube.
Obviously, you’re not going to get big-name artists right away (or maybe ever), but that’s true of basically every fediverse project at the start. You’d still get regular users, indie artists, experimental musicians, archive uploads, and all the strange internet music culture that YouTube Music accidentally preserves.
Curious what people here think:
Could PeerTube realistically be extended in this direction?
Is it feasible with current ActivityPub tooling?
Are there projects I’m missing that already aim for this, beyond Funkwhale?
Or does Funkwhale already cover more of this than I’m giving it credit for?
Interested to hear thoughts.
I would love to help with something like this, but, unfortunately, I lack the time and energy.
I assume you mean for artists, to do it legally?
I’ve been collecting physical audio from friends and family for decades. The idea is, you scratch your disc, I gotcha — you don’t need to go buy another one. At first it was just “cover the cost of a blank,” but the blanks got cheap enough (and the burners got fast enough) that it wasn’t a big deal. Even my technophobe mother saw the benefit of me plugging my laptop into her home stereo and DJing on it. So she would get up and change records. Once I showed her I had all the albums on the computer and could easily change them with clicks (or taps) rather than physical activity… she was 100% sold.
Now I have all that music on a Plex server. I just share with family though. Something like that, if you had a web of people sharing Plex shares, would be cool, but not exactly legit. Maybe something to ask about on an instance like db0 rather than .world. Because generally anything involving copyright tends to be frowned on by bigger/more public instances… and I try not to break rules on other instances.
But the problem is, rights are messy, to say the least.
Actually, what I would prefer is something closer to what Google Play Music was.
I don’t want to just stream music. I want to buy music and have it available to stream. YouTube music doesn’t do this. The closest I can maybe find is Bandcamp. But I’d probably be to pay an artist for an album and then give them a few cents to stream their songs.