cat kouhai*.txt

@kouhai

✨ magical girls ✨

she/they
kouhai.dev/

the lightly-fictionalized account of a club of magical girl kouhais… and the sparkling senpais they chase

activitypub? mastodon? what?

social.treehouse.systems/@kouhai

cat kouhai*.txt @kouhai12/5/2023, 8:53 PM

Irenes (many)@ireneista

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/5/2023, 6:45 PM

hey music people

is there anything the computer people can do to help you depend less on commercial music distribution services that don't care about you?

we don't want to do the thing of just jumping in and building something without talking to people. we kinda suspect most of the actual STUFF to self-host or whatever model makes more sense already exists anyway and any unmet needs are more about documentation?

also we don't know whether we personally even have time to, but we know there are an awful lot of people around here who do and maybe a conversation about it would help get that energy organized in productive directions?

also if the answer is that no, the problems aren't the kind of thing that someone else can help with, that is a perfectly sensible answer too and it would be better to know that

feel free to reshare for visibility

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in reply to @ireneista's post:

sirocyl @sirocyl12/5/2023, 7:25 PM

what I largely want, as far as access, is something like soulseek, or a bittorrent-like backend, for music libraries, which is open-source, not tied to a server or its accounts (federated login?), and usable apps on more platforms than PC Desktop or Jailbroke iPhone.

Right now, I can't "set up a server". Not because I'm not technically able to, but because I have no income, and no way of safely placing a computer in my house "permanently online". I'm not even sure if I'll have a house by the end of the month.

sirocyl @sirocyl12/5/2023, 7:30 PM

"isn't this just music piracy?" well, let me put this a different way: You cannot buy video game music. Few games are popular or moneyed enough to have an OST release, and usually the OST itself is low-quality game rips and largely incomplete. The same goes for a lot of out-of-print music, classics, independent artists who have left or been driven off fronts like bandcamp, the music of demoscene hackers and convicted cybercriminals, and local musicians and artists who don't have Publishing Money, whose music disappears after they quit maintaining the youtube channel it's uploaded to, it gets content-matched because it is music on youtube and sounds to an AI like a sample from Teeny Weeny Yellow Polkadot Bikini for sixty milliseconds, and it inevitably goes dark.

Something with the architecture of music piracy, goes a long way toward saving this dark music from loss.

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/5/2023, 7:31 PM

we do see the point here

our goal is to help musicians rather than listeners, so that's primarily the group whose lead we'd prefer to follow. we realize that there's no music community if people have no way to listen to stuff, of course...

sirocyl @sirocyl12/5/2023, 7:43 PM

right, that's valid. I have three notes, then, on the other side of things:

an independent physical medium for music distribution and sales. Right now, it's USB drives, SD cards, or CDs. The problem is, a flash drive and full-size SD card are fragile, not stackable/sortable in a library, and USB sticks are not as plug-and-go. microSD cards are too small to be interchangeable. CD-ROM drives are rare in 2023, and can only contain redbook audio or CD-ROM with either MP3, or nonstandard formats that may or may not play. I have something of a solution to this in the works, but an on-disk format and packaging standard would accompany this.
I feel that something that can easily enable tagging music with a way to donate to the original artist, would go a long way. More than just a plain URL field in the ID3, which already exists - essentially a link to a website that identifies "I came from this album/track to give you money".
In addition to the previous, a reliable website for giving money to artists, and making it known what work you're pledging your patronage towards, whether or not you bought their album beforehand.

This would go a long way to working artists out of the shackles of the bandcamp-likes, and should be easier than "itch.io + ko-fi", if not using those services directly and making a better frontend specifically for music.

fictive @artemis12/5/2023, 10:52 PM

poach all the people that made bandcamp and pay them to make bandcamp 2

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/5/2023, 10:57 PM

we do adore this answer although we see no way to do that without accepting venture capital, which in our view would fundamentally sabotage it

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/5/2023, 10:57 PM

(we have money and are happy to use it towards that cause. we do not have the money to hire fifty people.)

fictive @artemis12/5/2023, 10:58 PM

yup. same!

Philippa Cowderoy @flippac12/7/2023, 2:02 AM

This one's valuable enough to be worth attempting crowdfunding if you can figure out a lower-running-cost plan for once it's up and running.

That would probably leave a bunch of volunteers providing "non-core" services that Bandcamp 1 did, unfortunately, but it makes it a lot more viable to get running and then see about making a pool of compensation available for volunteers later.

Philippa Cowderoy @flippac12/7/2023, 2:07 AM

I guess it's worth adding that tooling to back the content distribution stuff with a p2p model would be a nice way to lower costs if users are willing to join in. You still need "central" storage for lossless copies of everything with sufficient resilience, but that's nowhere near as horrifying a thought now as it was when Bandcamp started. Re-encoding to save (a small constant factor of...) storage for "long tail" material you can't find on the p2p system any more isn't a problem, especially if you keep to deterministic encoders.

Nycki @nycki12/5/2023, 11:10 PM

As a listener, the biggest issue for me is discovery. I wonder if it would be possible to set up a "music wiki" on the same scale as, say, tvtropes or imdb, for people to discuss and categorize the universe of music.

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/5/2023, 11:14 PM

decades ago we participated in wikis that were oriented around discussion rather than encyclopedia-style content (all the early wikis were like that)

a couple of them are still around but it turns out to be a mode of interaction that it's really hard to engage people with today, possibly because it requires too much explanation and people today aren't approaching the internet as if it's an experiment, they're approaching it with preconceptions of what it's for and how it's used. a natural enough transition, in hindsight....

this is not to say no to the idea, we're just ruminating on the context it would exist in and what that might mean for the shape it would have to take. we hear you saying that the answer to discovery is community, which lines up with @frequencymodulator's amazing remark above.

Nycki @nycki12/5/2023, 11:19 PM

It wouldn't have to be purely an old-school discussion wiki, either; tvtropes seems to do fine having an "encyclopedia" page about every story under the sun, with an accompanying "talk" page for further discussion. But yeah, good point, I have found it surprisingly difficult to onboard newbies into the "everybody edits" mentality.

@ROU12/6/2023, 9:49 AM

unfortunately i agree with @frequencymodulator that this isn't an issue that can be solved without heavily shifting the culture around art. there are some changes that can be made on the technological side, like moving away from predatory streaming and payment models like spotify and patreon (and more broadly youtube, steam, etc) towards ones made with actual intent to support the creators they serve. but otherwise?

people just have to learn to pay the folks who make the things they like. not because they need to to access it but because they want to enable their continued existence as artists. and for what it's worth, there is some amount of this going on - there's patreon and pwyw downloads and merch and so forth - but there could be a whole lot more. but the siren song of "just get everything for free" is a real bitch, i get it.

the other issue i see is that the average person isn't interested in searching out independent art. why bother, i guess, when the mainstream stuff is already all anyone around you talks about. who cares about fucking nerve house when you can listen to jack harlow. he did a single with nas! why play dread delusion, starfield just came out. why watch barber westchester when you could go to disney+ and watch wish. and sure there are indie artists who do get recognition, and i love 'em just as much, but they inadvertently fall under the same umbrella of monopolizing attention. idk this feels less actionable than the other point but it always bothers me so i'll rant about it if i want to dammit.

alexa @amelyssan12/6/2023, 4:45 PM

i'm of a few minds here, but i believe a major symptom of the corporatization of music listening is the death of word-of-mouth sources of information like zines, public third spaces, and blogs.

i don't know what a technology-centered solution looks like, but i know that where i am, the local music scenes stays alive and healthy based on the spread and digitization of some core magazines that collect and curate info on local events. any city that doesn't have those kinds of resources could use them, whether paper or digital.

next, people need to actually look at those resources, which is the hard part because that requires competing with the algorithm-driven internet. on an optimistic note, we're presumably on cohost as a result of word-of-mouth communication.

anyway, death to venture capital, and i really haven't proposed any courses of action

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/6/2023, 6:16 PM

yeah fuck venture capital SO MUCH

the engineering mindset says that first we describe the problem and the constraints as best we can. we can start worrying about solutions after we're sure we understand that stuff.

Philippa Cowderoy @flippac12/7/2023, 1:58 AM

A co-op payment processor that's capable of finding ways around the stuff the credit card companies like to enforce and has a cheap way to get into the co-operative's ground floor.

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/7/2023, 2:46 AM

nice thought. not sure we can find it again due to the nature of Cohost, but a little while ago we were reading about a co-op payment processor that has, thus far, had to set a policy of not allowing adult content because they refuse to do anything that would require them to enforce some other company's specific nuanced rules about such content

Irenes (many)@ireneista12/7/2023, 2:47 AM

we also had to give a friend the "you cannot invent your way around the law" lecture on this topic a few weeks ago :(