There’s a really cool open source alternative to Bandcamp that just came out. With some questions raised about Bandcamp’s future, some musicians in the Fediverse are leaning into the new platform as a different approach to selling their music.
Faircamp is just a static site, and doesn’t federate itself, but its adoption within the Fediverse suggests that people are at least thinking about alternative solutions.
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Doesn’t really matter if it is good or bad, at the end of the day I am forced to go where the people I like choose to sell their music. Right now I use band camp because it gives the most money to artists and it is heavily used by my chosen genre but if band camp goes tits up I have to go where they go.
Maybe if someone will offer paid management of this software, people could contact the artist and suggest it as an alternative.
The setting up of servers and understanding the fediverse will prevent most artists from participating in this, I feel…
I’d love for this to take off though, I’m fucking pissed that Epic ruined Bandcamp.What happened?
Epic bought them (I think they wanted to start competing with Spotify?), laid off a bunch of staff, SOLD Bandcamp to Songtradr, who then laid off %50 of their staff
What questions about Bandcamp’s future?
Epic sold Bandcamp a few weeks ago and the new owners instantly laid off a large part of the staff. It’s fair to say that Bandcamps future is uncertain.
Oh, I didn’t even know Epic owned Bandcamp. Thank you.
Epic also only bought it last year.
Are you living under a rock?
Yes.
own or rent?
Your own rock, in this economy?
Thanks, this gave me a genuine chuckle :)
Everyone wants a rock to tie a piece of string around
Would it be looked down upon to host podcasts on this site?
This is not a site. It’s software you can use to host and publish your music… And I think it would work for podcasts too.
So, would you have to have a separate computer for this or is it safe to just hook up to your laptop? I apologize if I’m dumb about this, I haven’t seen what they seem to be describing.It’s a site builder, I get it now.
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I appreciate the explanation and your English is great. I get it now, it’s a website builder for your music that can be hosted on an instance, your instance, or a web hosting site like godaddy. I thought that it used your laptop or desktop as a sort of temp instance.
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I’d probably suggest having a dedicated machine. You don’t need anything fancy, I’d imagine any old laptop should do.
It’s essentially software to convert your machine into a basic web server, so if the laptop disconnects now nobody can download your stuff. And I assume you don’t keep your laptop on 24/7
I don’t trust myself to do any of that, I have to say. I wonder if there could be a musician that is computer savvy as well, that could host an instance for everyone.
That’s kind of the crux of a lot of these things. The instructions make it look really simple to install, but if you’ve never done this before then I could understand it being confusing. There was this teeny tiny line in the middle of some pictures that says someone will help you set them up I think.
More notably, Radio Free Fedi has been incredibly proactive, offering a free service to help Fedi musicians host their own Faircamp sites on RadioFreeFedi’s infrastructure.
It looks like you just ask them for help and send them some of your songs and they’ll handle the setup.
That’s super kind of them:
. It is quite not painful. We have some funds donated by lovely members of the RFF community specifically for artists who may need help with a solution like this and may be in no position to help with setup or a small monthly contribution toward upkeep. So please reach out!
They seem great but that font, yikes to read.
Thanks for the feedback, I added a big quote from Radio Free Fedi to call more attention to that effort.
You’d probably want to host it on an actual server, if you want people to be able to access it when your laptop isn’t on. The documentation seems pretty good, though, it should walk you through the steps: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/manual/installation.html
So it is saying you would be the personal server and it builds the site for you. Being on the more creative side of computers, I don’t think you understand how confusing that all reads. I appreciate you thinking I’m smarter than I am though, lol.
Fair point, I should probably clear that up. Static site generators typically work through a process that builds pages for you on the fly, based on what’s in the folder. However, for it to be available on the Internet, you’d still need a server to run the program, so that you can generate those pages.
I’ve never hosted my own sites, I’ve always used like a godaddy. TBF, I’ve never known you could.
If, and this is a big if, it can support an RSS feed that also allows you to provide the requisite info apple et al demand (3000x3000 pixel image, categories, etc.) then it could in theory support it. The bigger concern is traffic - will they be cool with you syndicating out and having folks pulling that frequently and can it support a lot of folks with larger shows doing it. Some podcatchers won’t care and will let you just use an RSS pointing at the page hosting the files, but it’s not a given especially with the larger ones.
My advice? Unless you want to really hack it together yourself and accept that it could force you to migrate without any notice, sure give it a shot. If you are risk averse, don’t want to disrupt your listeners, aren’t really comfortable doing a lot of tech troubleshooting, etc. I’d say don’t try it. Podcast hosting is trivially inexpensive and all the big services have an embeddable player now if you really want folks to listen on your site.
Edit: worth noting that a lot of this is going to depend on whether an instance admin specifically wants to deal with all your traffic, assuming you get regular users/the numbers are decently high. If you stand up your own instance then it’s all about what your infrastructure can support.
You might be interested in Funkwhale instead.
It’s a more mature piece of software, it does federate and they’ve even put quite a bit of effort into podcasts.They have a flagship instance at open.audio, which only allows Creative Commons content (to avoid copyright issues when federating).
So, as I understand, if your podcast is CC-licensed, they’d be happy to host yours.Thanks for this, it does seem to be what I’d be more interested in. So please correct me if I’m understanding this wrong. Funkwhale is like lemmy or kbin, in that it’s a way of using the fediverse and open.audio is an instance of funkwhale. Am I getting that right?
Yeah, everything you said there is correct.
If you want a somewhat more comprehensive definition:
Funkwhale, Lemmy, Kbin (as well as Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed etc.) are pieces of software, which can be hosted on a server and which implement a communication protocol for the federation of social media content.If someone then takes such a piece of software and actually does host it on their server, then that’s called an instance. Generally, they need to buy a domain name to do so, like “open.audio”, “lemmy.world”, “feddit.de” and so on.
Awesome, we’ll give open.audio a try. Thanks for going slowly on explaining, I think I’m finally catching on.
Honestly, fuck Bandcamp. I used that platform for years, purchased a huge library, supported artists even when I was about 90% sure that some of them were just resellers providing rips of the original artists music.
And then for no reason at all a few weeks ago, I was asked to verify my account via email. Despite using the correct autosaved password. That email never arrived. Never arrives no matter what I try. So I cannot get back in. Support is like check your spam folder like motherfucker you don’t think that’s the first place I went when I didn’t see the conformation email?
Fuck the new ownership. Fuck Bandcamp. Good luck with your upcoming job search.
