Funkwhale is looking for new maintainers
blog.funkwhale.audio
blog.funkwhale.audio
We need to bring back the culture of small business charging for the software, and users paying for it. If your software is paid, your revenue generally scales with your user base, so you can go full time on the project, or even start hiring people to help you. Also, since your revenue comes directly from your users, you want to listen to their requests and align your software with them. You can't just release an overnight patch pissing most users off, because you will feel the monetary loss right away.
Except, these days, people expect consumer software to be free. So it's either the naive founder driving themselves to a burnout, or one of the big companies monetizing it indirectly (by charging for their cloud platform, or via ads). Maintainers lose, users lose, corporations win.
Thus most of our tooling ended up being open source.
as a student, i liked the idea of getting it for free, but couldnt figure out the compiling (im an illustrator/designer that dabbles in code, but not much at all) so i footed the ~$20 to be able to use it.
What you say does make some sense, but I don't think the problem is that people is unwilling to pay, but rather that you don't want to pay until you actually determine that something is useful (and this is actually positive, as you would remove a lot of junk from the world that only looks fancy for the first 5 minutes), but afterwards paying is often too burdensome (because you already have it for free, you have to go to the donation page, have to decide how much money to donate, etc (yeah, all this seems absurd, but it is adding friction to the process, and this happens for so many software tools that we use in our day to day, that we just decide to ignore it)).
To me, it seems like it would be better to have a fairness system, where you put some money limit per month, you can see which free software tools are you using (or bands are listening, or many others) and which ones could use some money, usage of each element is automatically monitored, and every month you pay automatically. You could specify how much money you make and get automatic feedback based on whether you are giving too little or too much for your use of those resources. I've seen multiple companies that have tried to do this "fairness" thing... but the most popular one is still patreon and that's too much manual work. There are many hard problems with this proposal, mostly how do you do the communication/monitoring of the elements you want to donate for and this system, and how you determine if what software developers / artists / whatever are asking for is fair or not (this is the really big one), but it doesn't seem so far fetched. What we all really want is a fair distribution of the rewards for our efforts. We have to solve this at some point, and the obstacles are friction, the previously mentioned determination of "reasonable compensation", and consensus on the tool to solve these two (which should be funded through itself).
And journalism, and music, and art, and...
Here's some extra incentive from the blog post for people to consider:
> Some of the development tasks can be paid, as we still have some of the NLNet funding. This could be an opportunity for you to get paid working on open-source software!
Funkwhale is implemented with Vue and Python.
Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone streams...
If Bandcamp invested in making their app a legitimate alternative to Spotify, we could maybe go back to buying music, though.
If you simply mean BUY music and store it digitally, I've got a 1.5TB external HDD filled with MP3s and FLACs that argues otherwise. Amazon's AutoRip is a nice timesaver, but I still largely prefer to do my own ripping via Exact Audio Copy.
That's a sweeping generalization... I like owning my music and not being in danger of losing it at the whim of a company or a country. The only danger to me right now is my library and its redundancies crashing.
If someone decides not to renew a contract, becomes too expensive for the service, moves to a country the service may not interact with, or decides to move to another service, I won't lose anything.
If I choose to switch services, I won't lose half my library.
I can get own music from obscure places or times services don't service or consider. I bet you most services don't have a lot of African music, no matter the decade. It doesn't even have to be obscure, there are great mixtapes from the 90s and 00s that just aren't on online services.
I know this may be shocking, but... a lot of people still does it.
And Youtube Music isn't much better, and it's only a matter of time before their aggressive opinions on what's good for their consumers diverges from mine.
I'm not willing to let a company dictate which music I can listen to based on licensing agreements with yet another company. I try to buy my music directly from the creator, and keep it safe and sound.
Funkwhale will never be as large as Spotify, and that's fine. There is a niche for what they're offering.
I listen to a lot of Indian music (film soundtracks), and Google was annoyingly consistent in changing my songs to different language versions because their acoustic fingerprint training models are shit.
That's kind of what I assumed. I'm sure YouTube will make a few changes in the coming year that'll make it worthwhile to deal with the hassle of setting this up and putting up with an alright experience. They're almost there as it is.
Torrent/soulseek if the song is region-locked, sold in lower quality, or if it takes me more than 5 min to find a legit link.
> Fans have paid artists $619 million using Bandcamp, and $18.3 million in the last 30 days alone.
And that is from Bandcamp alone. There are numerous other genre-specific sites that sell music, as well as Amazon, Google and others.
I can't speak for everyone, but one of the challenges of this relatively open market is managing music bought from different stores. Who wants 5 apps to stream from all these places? Funkwhale is really designed with a more libre/open source/communal spirit, but happens to be excellent at doing this for individuals too.
My family has a spotify account. In the past we used pandora. I have tried them both but I always immediately come back to playing albums from my own collection.
I'm in my mid 50s, and I grew up listening to album-oriented rock (AOR), and not just a stream of pop hits. I still prefer to listen to albums start to end. When an album ends, I judge my mood and think what album fits it and put that one on. That is something spotify doesn't do for me.
I also tend to find music I like better on there, though that comes down to personal taste I suppose.
I also like not paying Spotify. I resent them for giving people the idea that 10 bucks per month is all you should pay for having access to all the world's music. They're a bad company.
im very close to going back to using a local library again and i think it would actually work pretty good these days with software like syncthing and musicbrainz, docker, cheap and easy to set up VPS's etc etc... that weren't a thing when I started using spotify
You.