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.

  • RIotingPacifist@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 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.