Thanks for the link - been down a rabbit hole for the last hour or so! Really interesting. I’ve never really dealt with crypto but direct transactions look awesome. The fact that it uses open protocols is great too.

Have you released anything on it or are you a listener?

Ok! How has your experience with them, and releasing in general, been?

Ok, thanks for the info 👍 I was looking at their site and it said $1 per release - are there different tiers?

I’ll do that too but I would like to get actively involved in a music release pipeline that I think could be really positive. I guess I want to give to the listener as directly as possible.

I don’t think you’re wrong. I think the big corporate music streaming platforms are basically a low key scam. They are effectively pointless (beyond free file hosting), unless you are one of the 0.001% of artists that are heavily promoted on them and are an insult to musicians everywhere. More musicians need to reject the proposition of being one of the bottom stones that holds up their pyramid. I would rather my music was unknown on independent sites than unknown on theirs, where it will only add value to an exploitative business model and help to further entrench it.

I commend your generosity! I would like my music to be as free as possible but to retain some control over who gets to make money from it and how. If another poor artist wanted to use something in a sample or piece of video or performance art I’d be inclined to let them use it for free or cheap but if a powerful and exploitative company wanted to use it I would want to extract a price from them or deny it’s use if I didn’t like what they did.

What are your thoughts on Jamendo from an artists point of view?

Nothing is released yet. I would be happy for people to download my music to listen to without restrictions, which is why I’m looking into making it available as torrents.

Is Soundrop the distributor you use? I’ll have a look.

Will do 👌 I’m not familiar with websites to upload to - the only experience I have so far is searching for files within Qbittorrent, which I believe is using search plugins… How can I find these sites? Thanks

What is your instance running? I can see that it’s federated but I don’t recognise it. Thanks :)

Great, thank you 👍

I understand the concept of sharing ‘peer-to peer’, how a VPN works (and I use one) and I regularly use Qbittorrent to download files. I understand that in this context piracy is contravening an intellectual property license. That’s it! I don’t know how to distribute files using the technology.

I might use Bandcamp but I don’t want my music to be on youtube or spotify.

Yes, I will definitely be looking into Funkwhale. Bandwagon looks really exciting too.

Thanks 👍 I already use QBittorrent for downloading so I will look at that. What does it mean to ‘seed’ a file? And would the QBittorrent application need to be open constantly for this to work? If so, I may see about installing it on a VPS instead.

Thanks for those links :)

Yes, I’ve been looking at licensing today too. I think I will use the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. If I’m correct this would allow free sharing between listeners and adaptation for creative use with attribution, while preserving my ability to charge for commercial use.

Thanks. How does Soulseek work?

Thanks :) What are private torrent trackers? And what is Redacted?

Yes, I may use Bandcamp too or perhaps Faircamp, which you can host yourself. Bandwagon and Funkwhale appeal to me a lot as well, for the federation.

I can’t comment on Stalwart but if you’re looking for something reliable and easy to install on a VPS I recommend YUNOhost, which is a FOSS server OS that has email out of the box.