The CC Music Club

I went to a small show recently and I wanted to be able to offer these independent musicians a moral way to be successful. To build an audience and get paid.

I love that an independent music scene is developing on fedi, but there's a problem. It all seems to be about getting your music up on services that care more about the art than their own business which is great, but there's no curation. Without that, it's like the early days of the web. An endless amount of work but most of it will never be known to exist. Unless it's talked about and pointed to in the same old places by the same people. They retain their power to make stars etc.

What's possible today is everybody sharing and recommending music. That happens but in a broken way. It could be done so well without big business interests that it becomes so popular that music gets back to being the community builder that it was before the Spotify algorithm. When there was better access to radio stations that put the love of music first.

Today, we could have music players that connect you to others in order to see what they love. And for the more dedicated few, we can lower the barrier to being that essential piece of the puzzle, the person who is widely perceived to have great taste and dedicates themselves to finding and promoting great artists. To being a DJ but also building community and maybe organizing concerts.

So making it possible to do that DJ thing regularly, the music needs to be Creative Commons. It's ridiculous to have to ask every time you want to play a song for someone online. Bandwagon makes it possible for musicians to offer up their work without corporate concerns. Azuracast gives us a radio station. Peertube will let us host videos. And Owncast makes possible the live video streaming of DJ sets with live chat but also concerts.

CAVEAT: We still need more great mobile and OTT apps to optimize connecting to all this. And automatically paying creators needs to happen eventually. I don't know that there's enough pieces in places yet or working well-enough...

But the vision is coming together. Maybe if we can pull together much of the Creative Commons music scene behind this, we can get something going. I would be very concerned about avoiding lock-in. It needs to be the launching point to many other projects. To connecting independent artists to the world of independent software. Their fates are intertwined.