>I won't dive too much in the details, but I had serious health issues this summer, and the dust is only starting to settle. This affected my ability to work on the project on more important scale than expected, and I haven't been able to achieve anything lately but the most basic tasks.
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.
Many peoples minds seem to be stuck at either "charge and keep it closed source and heavily guarded" versus "FLOSS". There's nothing wrong with charging for free and open software if you'd otherwise be developing it purely based on donations to keep it open.
Part of the problem here though, is that many people don't want to pay for software if there is a free alternative, so market forces work such that anyone who tries to attempt such a thing often gets sidelined by someone else who releases their binaries for free.
I think this one applies: Aseprite pixel art/animation editor.
The source code is free to use on github, but if you dont know how to compile it, then they also sell it ready to go for most operating systems.
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.
I agree that we have too many people who add a lot of value to our society without getting much back, or easily become too burdened trying to manage something for which they do not have enough resources, even if they are actually getting something.
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).
I agree, there should be more encouragement to pay for software. Getting more people to embrace this idea means we can move away from a freemium model on the wider Internet as well.
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!
I had heard of funkwhale previously (as i've been on the fediverse for many years now)...but never was interested in installing something like it (nothing against funkwhale or similar platforms, i just really never needed to). But after reading the first page of their installation documentation [0], was quite impressed! This is how installation documentation should be written!! Now, i want to play with it, just because of how the doc is written. Who knows if i will keep things up, but apparently all it takes is to have really amazing documentation to interest me; go figure.
I guess we should clarify what we mean by "download". If you mean pirate music, then yeah, I guess I've largely stopped doing that (blogspot shares ain't what they used to be).
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.
> Seems like a project that is 10 years too late. Nobody downloads music files anymore. Everyone streams...
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.
Hi! You know one now. While I stream music from Google Play (or Google Youtube Music, or whatever they've pivoted to), I still have all the mp3s - and for good reason, because Google Music consistently tried to switch many of my tracks for the "censored" versions, which I'd have to re-upload.
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 also used Google Music, endured the switch to YT Music, and now just gave up and use the source MP3s playing locally.
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.
Like I said, it was years ago. And the setup process is ridiculously simple, especially with the docker setup. Very easy to give it a try locally before committing.
Of course Spotify is popular and it may well be a demographics thing, but I wouldn't say that this describes a sample size of "nobody", or excludes everyone in America:
> 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.
I live in the US. I had probably 800 albums or so in 1986 when I started re-buying most of them as CDs. In the late 90s I spent weeks ripping them to 192kbps MP3s via lame. Since then I've bought many hundreds more CDs, though recently it is usually just buying mp3s directly from bandcamp or from amazon. On occasion I will buy the physical CD because it is cheaper than a digital-only mp3 option. I just checked and I have a bit over 20,000 songs.
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.
People that enjoy listening to music -- audiophiles, DJs, music producers, musicians, etc -- often search out and download their favorite tunes, .flac and .wav specifically, simply b/c these formats have higher fidelity to the master mix. Granted, not everyone cares about high-fidelity audio, and that's ok too.
Sure, on average MOST people stream but claiming "Nobody" downloads music files anymore is just flat wrong. Bandcamp clearly isn't interested in competing with Spotify as an app for streaming (and as a frequent buyer from BC, I don't want them to try), they are interested in being a low-friction marketplace for people who want to buy and sell music and download it in a variety of formats.
I've never used Spotify, I use bandcamp all the time. I've bought a bunch of music off there. It may not be as convenient, but I really like the idea of being able to pay artists directly and have them get most of it minus a small cut for Bandcamp.
I also tend to find music I like better on there, though that comes down to personal taste I suppose.
I spend a lot of money on music - a lot more per year than a Spotify subscription - and none of it goes to people like Kanye West. I really like that.
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.
The Fediverse core means that it's a project that likely could only have existed now, with the decentralized base protocol to build on and the automatic integration with hundreds of tiny social networks.
every time a song on any of my spotify playlists disappears and turns grey i add it to a playlist, and that playlist is growing very large as the years go on. (and that's not including songs that have always been missing from spotify's library)
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
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.