What do you want to know?
I believe this depends on the platform where Funkwhale tracks are embedded rather than in Funkwhale the software itself.
This is what happens when pasting a plain URL here:
https://open.audio/library/albums/16183/
the Discourse software turns it into
This problem can be technically solved, but it requires extra work, just like someone did extra work to get players form Soundcloud, Bandcamp, YouTube, etc.
Funkwhale offers an “Embed” code on every track or album that is based on iframe. That works for your own website or anything offering full HTML, but community / social media platforms rarely offer that level of access to plain users because it’s a potential risk for misuse.
This code
<iframe width="100%" height="330" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="https://open.audio/front/embed.html?&type=album&id=16183"></iframe>
Should look like this when full HTML is supported (this is just a screenshot):
But this is what you get here: (if you see nothing below it’s because Discourse is filtering everything out; the code is there) 
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Connected to the discussion on Bandcamp laid off about half of company staff, one alternative could be the Funkwhale network supported with OpenCollective powered payments (or similar alternatives, up to the taste of each artist). Most musicians publishing on Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc, don’t do it for the money anyway and don’t have much income. OpenCollective offers a more sustainable alternative.
Anyone here on Elektronauts have the energy/care/capability to collaborate on a project that would enable this?
I have the technological knowledge and experience to build something like this, but there are so many more parts involved, especially regarding the community and managing side of things, that it would be a big bullet to bite for someone solo.
If there is any serious interest in collaborating on a project like this, reach out to me (Be aware that the platform to be collaborated on would be for the benefit of the community, not for you to earn as much cash as possible quickly, it’s likely to not make money at all)
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I want to sell it to a computer games company 🥲
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I’m interested and I think I can contribute some skills… but I’m busy, and my hobby time is supposed to go to creating bad music and turning knobs for fun. Then again, the idea is very interesting, the moment might be right, and this community could provide an initial critical mass of artists and community to get things started.
I would choose the path of least resistance:
- set up a Funkwhale instance on a hosting provider
- set up an OpenCollective org to have the funding handled transparently and collectively
- start with musicians that just want to learn and experiment with this new self-owned platform, not in a rush to see a cent.
Then start, learn, iterate, improve, and start tacking bigger problems as we have the need and capacity to address them.
It would be good to have a very minimal critical mass to start. Say having at least three people with tech/admin/community experience and, say, a dozen artists volunteering to publish their music.
@vblr if you want to try, I’m in too. A third person (and more) would be nice.
PS: we also need a name/domain. I would vote for something related to electronic music but not with a specific company.
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So I spent a fair amount of time researching this a year or so ago. The conclusion I came to is like what you say: by far the largest part of the project is the community management. In particular, any service that has even a small way to host a few Mb of content will quickly be taken over by pirates wanting to park their warez.
I’m not very smart, but the only way I could think of to effectively combat this without a massive moderation effort was to charge up front membership costs that are in excess of what similar services offer. What I found was the market for “a more simple SoundCloud” is pretty large. The market for “a more simple SoundCloud that is also more expensive”… less so.
Something like a Patreon model could also work to cut down on illegal hosting. You can publish whatever, but rather than it being open-access, streamers have to subscribe and/or pay. This has nice dynamics as far as moderation and sharing are concerned (monetization, also), but no one’s going to subscribe to my unknown ass. The nice thing about soundcloud was it was a place to park my music where the occasional, minimally interested person could get to it.
Ultimately it was too many conflicting constraints and I had too little time to pursue further. Hope someone else does better than me, though. I’d still love something like this.
As a part of my previous efforts, I registered nauts.studio. It points to nothing now, and I’d be happy to donate it to anyone that wants it.
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I take your point but doesn’t the fediverse have tools to overcome this ? I remember that with mastodon I had to something extra to prove I was a unique, traceable individual (by putting something on a website/webpage I controlled). I’m thinking you could (possibly) make that mandatory for uploading files ?
There are many questions to explore and answer, of course. I personally find more motivation to answer them by trying something together.
Risk of publisher spammers? Let’s start with a small contribution to get an account (i.e. 10€ or equivalent, to be waived to artists with music published requesting an exemption).
A very basic question I have is how good is Funkwhale as a tool to publish non-freely licensed music. It’s clearly good for CreativeCommons and music that artists don’t care much what use will be done, but do Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc offer more protection to copyrighted music published by their authors? Short term solution: start with CC music for starters and put a big disclaimers for creators telling them that people might just be able to download their music for free.
And a long etc. If it would be easy, others would have done it.
I am very interested in this as a project, but I have no technical skills or experience with operating anything like this, so I’m not even sure what skills I would need to learn to help with some part of it on the less tech side. If this progresses maybe a good idea would be a list of “job titles” with detailed accountings of what those jobs would be responsible for. I am imagining this as a sort of collective on the operations end and job titles could be amended or merged or split into multiple positions in the future, but any group project I’ve been involved in where responsibilities weren’t explicitly laid out and split among people always ended up with too much on one person and that person is likely to burn out. Explicitly stated responsibilities would also give someone like me the ability to research the actual skills required in each role so that I could be realistic about my ability to help.
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There is an ongoing discussion on Mastodon at benda: "@jamesbritt@mastodon.social @fstateaudio@mastodon…" - kolektiva.social that includes some first-hand knowledge of Funkwhale and I have linked to this discussion there. It includes some opinions critical toward Funkwhale as a tool for this job, but no alternatives are mentioned. Finding something that is free, open source, developed by someone else and fitting all your needs from the start is hard.
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About moderation, in addition to a membership for publishing there are community moderation tools available, which should help:
There is also the aspect of streaming vs downloading files. As of now, and as far as I can see, Funkwhale only does streaming. Then again, is downloading music so important (to start this experiment)? I have purchased quite some music on Bandcamp and I have downloaded files sometimes… to never actually use them. At least for the music I purchase, all songs are there available for free streaming, and I pay only to support the artists, not to get access to the files. Is that your case as well?
I’m looking into Faircamp + GitHub Pages
currently. Not a ton of storage space, but I don’t have a huge catalog to present.
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My last release got 55 free downloads from bandcamp and 3 purchases. I don’t get much traffic on soundcloud or spotify, so unless people that are downloading my music are bots or just downloading it because it’s free and never actually listening to it, it points to downloading still being essential to some people.
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After reading and thinking more… I got to a different conclusion than yesterday. Creating a Funkwhale instance (or any free alternative) as a reaction to the Bandcamp situation is likely to solve no problems and cause frustration to the artists joining and the project promoters. Why?
Decentralization? The Fediverse offers true decentralization, very good to federate specialized communities (i.e. free music produced with Elektron devices) but (imho) not to build alternatives to big centralized platforms like Bandcamp or Soundcloud. Most people wanting a “decentralized” platform today, what really want is decentralized governance of a centralized platform.
A new project? Artists willing to try Mastodon, Funkwhale, Peertube, etc, can do so today, and there are plenty of welcoming instances to choose from. There are also many other projects (open source and not, community driven and not) that these days want to establish Bandcamp / Soundcloud / etc alternatives. Some of them have several people volunteering work for years, some of them have semi-professional or professional structures and funding behind. Some might have connections in the music industry and knowledge about the specific law, payment platforms, etc.
Selling? Most artists concerned about the Bandcamp situation are concerned about “the last record shop”. The word “shop” is very important here. They are interested in selling their music, no matter to how niche audiences and for how small quantities. The Fediverse won’t solve the selling part today, especially not the traditional “selling by item” paradigm. Other paradigms like memberships, patrons, donations… are closer to the ethos and current tech trends of the Fediverse. Here too, if there are artists willing to try these models, they can do so already trying existing platforms, no need to wait for a new project coming from this discussion.
For all these reasons… I’ll continue contributing my bit to the Fediverse instances I’m a member of. I keep being interested in promoting Funkwhale / Peertube specialized instances bringing more artists to the Fediverse, but with the understanding that they have their reasons to exist unrelated to current events on commercial platforms.
There is a lot going on about possible post-Bandcamp alternatives. Two good reads imho:
This one calls to caution, stresses the risk of musicians being pulled by opportunists, and bets on Faircamp as a stopgap while the dust settles:
This one introduces a Fediverse alternative under development (not Funkwhale), coming from people with way more tech muscle and better music industry knowledge that we probably/surely have here:
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so i was tinkering around with faircamp the last two days. aaaaand i like it.
the DNS might still be ab it flaky but here we go: https://www.astrokill.eu
let’s see if embedding works:
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