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.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    11·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • deliriousdreams@fedia.io
      3·
      3 days ago

      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.

  • rako@tarte.nuage-libre.frFrançais
    1·
    2 days ago

    I’m curious as to what is wrong with funkwhale ? It does have issues but it also seems to fit your usecase

  • solrize@lemmy.mlEnglish
    7·
    3 days ago

    Bands can start their own “labels” on archive.org, https://archive.org/details/netlabels . is that what you had in mind?

    The attraction of youtube for almost all listeners is the huge copyrighted collection, which is (mostly) there through artist permission or upload, because the artists get a chunk of the ad revenue. Any serious competitor would also have to somehow deliver a payment stream, which means ads or subscriptions or something. Not really a fediverse thing.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netEnglish
    83·
    3 days ago

    I would love to comment on this, but unfortunatly I lack time and energy 👍

  • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    I think there are a few reasons that mean the network effect of music services (YT music, Spotify, etc) are hard to beat:

    • Available of commerical music - a service could obviously enable Piracy but this does make things more complicated
    • Exposure for smaller bands - there’s a reason that even C3 content tends to be posted to the fediverse using its YouTube upload instead of the native upload
    • Larger training data for recommendations - YT/Spotify can compare your entire listening history to every other user they have and use this to generate playlists of songs you might like, this is computationally expensive, relatively complex algorithmically (especially because it can’t be as simple as I doscribed at scale) & benefits from a large userbase.

    This is something I’d like to work on when the world isn’t as on fire, I’m less focused on the backend at the moment and think:

    • improvement could first be made to frontend apps like spottube (effective a Spotify privacy app), while piracy is easier (you can’t takedown software for enabling piracy as easily as you can services)
    • Scrobbing/Playlist integration across multiple services to get more data even from people still locked in to Spotify
    • Playlist generation with open algorithms - honestly this is something the fediverse is pretty weak on, I think Lemmy is really the only app I’ve seen grapple with this and it’s still very much functionally closed (while the code is open users can’t tweak their feeds)

    None of this really helps artists though, but by breaking the cartel of music services, playlist generation could more easily include sources that do pay artists.

  • Auster@thebrainbin.org
    4·
    3 days ago

    Personally, if I must listen to music through streaming, I don’t have much of a need for the Youtube Music variant, so my opinion below stems from that.

    Now, I think Peertube could retrofit that and benefit from it. I’ve seen discussions that it doesn’t improve as much as other ActivityPub platforms because videos are so big few end up making instances of them. But as musics are so much smaller, uploading them could give Peertube a boost in interest.

    And instance-wise, there could be instances focused solely on musics, or akin to Bluesky and Piefed, that offer lists that group channels/profiles/etc. based on common subjects.

    Also I know other instances can display Peertube contents, so maybe playlists that propagate through ActivityPub could be made too to work as some sort of radio?