• it/its

 


 

you toss the message in a bottle out to sea...

 

(asian-""american,"" plural, sleepy)

 



eramdam
@eramdam

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mirlo/mirlo
(don't know why the preview isn't working, weird)

From the outset we’re focusing on our “exit to community,” where those who contribute to the platform will have a say in how it is run and managed. We guarantee that their livelihoods will not be part of a corporate buyout. Drawing on our deep shared experience with mutual aid organizing and collective self-governance models, as well as our developers’ skills in building and maintaining open source software, we are excited for Mirlo to be a space where people gather to share music and support musicians!


curiousquail
@curiousquail

Took some time to set up an account for the band and add all of our music to it and have some thoughts about the process.

The experience felt a lot like using Bandcamp, with some minor quirks and caveats all of which are forgivable for a small team seeking funding.
Here are some of them which might help others setting up their page:

  1. banner images are backgrounds instead of headers but this isn't clearly explained
  2. track ordering drag and drop isn't very intuitive
  3. Uploading album art and details on a page doesn't save if you upload tracks and hit publish. You have to save the draft first or the album goes up without a name or cover.

Again, these are forgivable for a tiny startup - the only real downside I see is that they're currently using Stripe as their payment processor, and it's on you personally to set up the integration.
While this generally hasn't been a problem for music, Stripe's (to put it lightly) puritanical stances have been the detriment of artists and sex workers for years and I do not trust them. I know Cohost uses Stripe for plus subscriptions (and has voiced an interest in changing this I believe), but as an individual artist or a band you'd be responsible for your content and all it would take is Stripe deciding your music (or even album art?) is in violation of ToS and your Mirlo would be dead in the water. This is obviously an extreme example and my own bias against whorephobic capitalists is shining through but I wanted to be as transparent as possible.

That said - they have a few things going for them that bandcamp doesn't

  1. Not owned by Songtradr
  2. They take a 7% cut instead of Bandcamp's 15/10 (Stripe adds a 3%ish amount but bandcamp's card processes add as well, so net takehome with Mirlo would be higher, excluding Bandcamp Friday of course)
  3. Goal of creating a self-sustaining, community-run platform. This could go either way but I'm putting it in the positive camp.
  4. Mirlo means blackbird en español and I am both a bird fan and a chicano so this feels catered to me, personally

Summary?

I don't know what happens if the kickstarter fails. I don't know what happens if it succeeds. The platform they're pitching sounds great, and mulder's poster dot jpg but who knows, right?


As with all webbed sites where you upload content, their ToS has what some detractors would panic and call a scary clause about 'the worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free' right to use the stuff you upload, but as people have said in the past - this is how user generated content exists online. The difference between the Mirlo ToS and Cohosts in this instance are pretty slim, with the exception of a paragraph about how if they use your content for commercialisation (ads, promo, etc) they have the right to edit it. I'm not wild on that - but the implication is 'we need a 10 second clip of your song for an ad' and not 'we're going to autotune you for a tiktok vid promoting our service' though the latter would fall into scope. I don't know - I really don't wanna fearmonger this shit.

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in reply to @curiousquail's post:

Again, these are forgivable for a tiny startup - the only real downside I see is that they're currently using Stripe as their payment processor, and it's on you personally to set up the integration.

Does Bandcamp not use Stripe or do they interface directly with, huh PayPal and credit card companies? (I genuinely don't know and as a user i never saw any mention of Stripe from Bandcamp so i'm curious)

Good point - Bandcamp uses Paypal for their transactions (which is its own can of worms), but added Stripe specifically for their Subscription service. I haven't used the latter, so it hasn't come up.

Also to be fair, the setup feels easier on Bandcamp because you simply input your PayPal address. Since I don’t have a Stripe account I had to create one and go through those hoops from scratch - but I imagine that would be the same time sink for someone on Bandcamp setting up a PayPal for the first time.

I feel like they have to either use Stripe or a Secret Third Option for non-Paypal purchases too 🤔 Or I guess they use Stripe and integrate it such that users don't have to do much when checking out? (I mostly pay using a bandcamp-specific card so I almost never use PayPal with them)

Like honestly? It was pretty easy to go from setup (which I did entirely on my phone in a browser until I needed to add actual audio files) to finished album.
As an artist, I don't see a reason not to set one up right now if there's a chance someone will use it.

Also the lower browser bar music player is great, even if they're not really doing anything special with it.

I took a stab at it and found it to be pretty alright on desktop, but there are a lot of bumpy spots (the aforementioned UX issues) plus:

  • Release prices have to be an integer...
  • Release pricing is in USD, but this isn't communicated on the setup side; only when you click the "Buy" button as a customer
  • It doesn't automatically fill out metadata from the release fields if you upload Wavs, whereas bandcamp does

Overall not bad for people like me, but I know my less web-savvy bandmates would bounce off this really hard at the current stage.

Really good points on the price stuff - I forgot to mention #3 but yea, it's a bit weird; I had to manually remove the .wav from each of the track names and that was a bit annoying but again, I think with a UI iteration (and feedback from a larger user base) these are easy fixes.

Totally. It works with flacs if their metadata is already filled out, but I think the hangup is that a lot of artists rely on the service to apply the metadata to the final files.

Found another small nitpick, but the text areas for albums don't support newlines unless you return twice.. hmm.

I'm curious to see where they get to! It'd be interesting to have a new player in the game.

When uploading my stuff to Mirlo I’ve been using bandcrash to prepare the album as a FLAC collection and uploading that. Works great, and is way easier than mirlo’s own titling/tagging system.

EDIT: Oops forgot to link to the actual app page on my itch page

I really hope the price-needs-to-be-integer doesn't mean they're storing prices as dollars instead of cents because otherwise it spells trouble if/when they want to change it lolsob

As with all webbed sites where you upload content, their ToS has what some detractors would panic and call a scary clause about 'the worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free' right to use the stuff you upload, but as people have said in the past - this is how user generated content exists online.

Yeah. These clauses are basically required even to just generate a thumbnail of an image or host a copy of it so there's always some nuance to be applied about those clauses.

yeah, it seems every year or so someone re-discovers that every ToS under the sun says that and ascribes the worst intent on any services with it without knowing why it's writtent his way in the first place lol

Non-lawyer thoughts on the TOS IP clause you mention: The problem with this clause as I see it is the "nonrevocable". It does seem to be true that UGC websites legitimately require a fairly broad license for ordinary use, but ideally there would be some situation under which you could terminate your relationship with the company— say in extreme situations like the company rebranding as pro-white-supremacist, or the company violating the terms of the IP license. (I don't think comparing this to Cohost's TOS is a good defense because I think the IP terms in Cohost's TOS are actually quite problematic— worse than the comparable terms in the X, Facebook and Tumblr TOSes— and I hope @staff can be convinced to amend them at some point.)

However I would actually say that this TOS is better than Cohost's, or for example TikTok's, because those "worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable" rights are qualified in some way, e.g., the expansive clause is prefaced with "For the purposes of marketing", which a court probably would interpret to mean that there are limits on trying to apply this expansive license for non-marketing purposes. This excludes most really bad misuses of the license. Although I do think that contributors to this site should at some point use that community-governance model they claim to be moving toward to request a process for Mirlo artists to reliably demand Mirlo stop selling new licenses to your works (obviously, it would not make sense for you to demand Mirlo stop distributing copies of your work to customers who have already paid for it!), it doesn't seem to me at this early date a reason to avoid using the service as an artist. A better analogy than Cohost might be TikTok; if you have uploaded any music or musical performances to TikTok, whose IP assignment terms are radioactive and worse than any other service I know of, you have permanently opted in to something much, much worse than the "could be improved" Mirlo license. (I do not know how Bandcamp's license compares.)

I repeat: I am not a lawyer. Do not trust me.

My non-lawyer understanding from work stuff is that nonrevocable clauses are at risk of being deemed invalid in cases where the terms are being violated, i.e. you can't just claim forever rights and then break the terms without losing the forever rights.