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Self-hosting is a huge PITA, especially if you don't want to give away your music for free: setting up and maintaining a streaming server and payment system is
by deng 11y ago
Self-hosting is a huge PITA, especially if you don't want to give away your music for free: setting up and maintaining a streaming server and payment system is not trivial at all. Also, if you're not already a big name, self-hosting will make it unlikely for people to discover your music. This was the big thing about SoundCloud: you followed people you like and saw what they liked.
The solution is what Bandcamp does: only host stuff where the copyright situation is clear. Which means: people selling the music they themselves created. This of course excludes mixes/remixes of copyrighted music.
- tel 11y agoSo you're saying there's space for a "DIY self-hosting" product which integrates with a promotion network?
- iphoneseventeen 11y agoA thousand times YES!!!
- brador 11y agoBuilding out that promotion network is the hard part.
- coderdude 11y agoSounds like this is something Gumroad could do if they added a marketplace to list the items for sale on their platform. Difficult to categorize all those items but worth it. I'd browse.
- wishinghand 11y agoI emailed them ages ago about being able to browse, but them and vhx.tv are not really into doing that now. Maybe later but for whatever reason they want people to reach their site and buy through the content creator's reach instead of having a searchable archive.
- pjc50 11y agoIf you're promoting music which is deemed to be copyright infringing you will have the same legal problems as if you were hosting it yourself.
- deng 11y agoNo, I don't think self hosting is the solution. I still remember the times when every label had its own little online shop for mp3s. Those were dark times: not only did you have to register at every shop separately, most of those shops where just plain unusable: no pre-listening, broken id3 tags, downloading each song from an album separately, charging extra for higher quality, no accompanying artwork, etc. As I've already written: I think Bandcamp does it very well, and IMHO it is currently the best shop for indie musicians to sell their music online.