7 ms·

Resonate: A music streaming service structured as a cooperative

dang 5y ago
A couple small past threads: Resonate – A community-owned music network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827361 - Aug 2019 (5 comments) Resonate – a cooperatively owned streaming music service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283175 - March 2016 (2 comments)
0des 5y ago
> Our unique Stream2own model splits the cost of a digital download into 9 plays. > Plays start off cheap when you're discovering and as you fall in love with a song, you come to pay the full price. > There's no transition out of Resonate to buy a song or album. Purchase it directly, or just keep listening. > Resonate pays artists directly and per-play. For listeners, the overall cost is similar to that of the average monthly streaming subscription. I'd be interested in seeing how the 9 plays number was derived, or a deeper discussion or article more than what's on the linked page. This is an interesting model, I hope it works out the way the creators intended.
- peteratomic 5y ago
  TBH I just liked the number 9. Subtle Beatles reference I guess. But the model also reflects the process of falling in love with an artist or an album, meaning the payout to the artist goes up the more I repeat listen.
agluszak 5y ago
The idea seems sweet. I registered immediately, but the catalog seems to be pretty empty for now. For me the biggest feature is being able to write a new client. Oh, how I wish Spotify or Tidal had open APIs...
- nivenkos 5y ago
  There are alternative Spotify clients, and it has an API.
- peteratomic 5y ago
  Once the User API is launched (expected in Dec 21) then we'll finally be able to automate profile and catalog creation for the many distributors standing by. Expecting 20-50X in catalog size then.
nyanpasu64 5y ago
Hmm, you have to pay to become a member, and additionally pay for each song you listen (if you exceed the "new user" credits). Can you sign up as a listener and an artist? I tried but it says "This username is already registered" and "This email address is already registered".
- satellites 5y ago
  Paying to become a co-op member is optional. Not required for listening. The latter seems like an issue though. It would be great to be able to convert a listener account into an artist account, or to have both under one account entity.
- peteratomic 5y ago
  We're about to launch an long-anticipated User API which is going to solve this double account type problem (listener + artist + etc). Supposed to drop in December. And the other comment is correct... co-op membership is optional.
missedthecue 5y ago
Unless I want to engage in charity, why would I use this over Spotify or Apple music?
- agluszak 5y ago
  Because you pay only for what you listen to and you can use an open API?
- siquick 5y ago
  So artists get paid?
  - bscphil 5y ago
    I have nothing against charity, but isn't that just charity under a different description?
    - patrickyeon 5y ago
      Paying a fair price to sustain something you want to see continue to exist isn't charity. Paying the lowest price you possibly can nearly always means someone along the way was exploited and not given a fair share of the value they created.
      - bscphil 5y ago
        > Paying the lowest price you possibly can nearly always means someone along the way was exploited No, I agree with that. But that's still engaging in charity, right? Voluntarily paying more for something that I could pay less for, so that artists will have a living wage, workers won't be exploited, etc etc. Your "sustain something you want to see continue to exist" suggests something else, though. What it suggests is that I have a good practical reason, on the basis of wanting to see good music continue to be created, to personally pay more for music. I think this is incorrect. If I was of the opinion that only a few artists made really great music, it might make sense to exclusively fund them so that they would continue doing so. But that's not the case: music is an extremely cheap commodity these days, because high quality production is so easy (can even be done with free or cheap software on an old laptop). There's enough good music put out there for free by people just doing it as a hobby to last a lifetime. You can't compete with that; a "fair share" of nothing is still nothing. Similar problem for Uber drivers: when there are too many drivers, the cost per ride gets driven through the floor. That's true regardless of whether Uber are exploiting their drivers (they probably are). I was evasive in my original reply, so let me put my cards on the table. I do think that voluntarily paying more for something than it is worth (its fair market price) is charity. And I don't think it is practicable to fix the problems with artist remuneration by encouraging everyone to be charitable. And I think it's a bit ludicrous to try to commandeer the word "fair" to mean something other than the market price, if you're not going to reconsider the more fundamental assumptions behind having a market in the first place. I would argue that if you want music to flourish, in something like its present democratized form, you need to do just that. Music should be understood as a human good - both creating and listening to it. All music is good, even bad music. All musicians should be supported, even those whose music wouldn't be popular enough to earn a living wage at the market price. Recall that even the Beatles were supposedly on the dole at one point. On the other hand, we could decide that music is simply not all that valuable to us, that creating more music than anyone can reasonably consume does not promote any particular human good, and let the current proliferation of music die. That's also a valid outcome. What isn't valid, to my way of thinking, is valuing music and then thinking that charity ought to be our way of responding to that value.
throw10920 5y ago
Practically, how is this better than my current local music library & player? "INEQUITIES have been exacerbated." - yikes, no thanks.
puppycodes 5y ago
you lost me at pay per play... also your pricing page doesnt actually give a sense of cost at all? 9 plays per what? 5 euro? 10 dollars? .0000005 eth?
- phailhaus 5y ago
  The pricing page gives prices in terms of "credits", their FAQ [1] includes the actual conversion rate: 1 credit ~= $1.49. That makes listening to a song the first time cost a bit less than 0.3 cents, and after 9 plays you will have paid the full cost of ~$1.50 [1] https://stream.resonate.coop/faq https://stream.resonate.coop/faq
- siquick 5y ago
  > also your pricing page doesnt actually give a sense of cost at all? 9 plays per what? 5 euro? 10 dollars? .0000005 eth? This is a huge oversight. Resonate is a good idea in theory but the majority of people who really care about independent artists getting paid properly for digital music (which seems to be the main purpose behind Resonate) are supporting artists by buying from Bandcamp, rather than solely streaming. Its kind of telling that Resonate has been around for 7 years yet the database is 13,000 songs. In my experience artists and labels will upload their music anywhere that will get them plays/pays. Not saying that Bandcamp is perfect but it really resonates (sorry) with artists and labels. Hopefully Resonate can get it right because we need more people to become comfortable with paying for music again.
  - Kye 5y ago
    For comparison: my own library of songs [0] is 127, and I'm not particularly prolific. That's just short of 1% of their library. Bandcamp has at least 100 people more prolific than I am. [0] https://vibrafox.bandcamp.com/ https://vibrafox.bandcamp.com/
    - siquick 5y ago
      Yeah there is a lot of music on there. The artist index [0] has 492 artists on each page and there are 3734 pages - safe to say that each artist has at least 1 track uploaded. [0] https://bandcamp.com/artist_index https://bandcamp.com/artist_index
satellites 5y ago
This seems really cool. Its aim should not be to usurp Spotify (will never happen since major record labels are entrenched in Spotify now). Rather, I could see this as an alternative to Bandcamp or other similar indie music sites. I actually like the pay-per-play model personally even though that might irk some people. I'm interested to see how the pricing shakes out for an audiophile type who consumes lots of music.
- winternett 5y ago
  Platforms should make money off ad revenue and prime placements and be happy with that. Radio sustained itself, along with the major music industry for many many years without needing to charge listeners and musicians for the music, and so did TV. Back then, we found epic music a lot more than now... Now we're duped into the false belief that somehow Spotify, while making record profit year after year paying artists $0.0000001 cent per stream is reasonable? This economy will bankrupt everyone who is not in their engineered and very controlled food chain if we give them subscription money just to listen to sponsored playlists that we can find and listen to elsewhere for free if we look hard enough. Tons of great musicians are putting out music on YouTube for free, and many other places, but the lazy attitude of only paying attention to charts, and letting playlists dictate what succeeds is really killing music because the money pipeline is locked down by the big industry, and it only pushes sterile and engineered music, not real honest music by naturally talented musicians. It's a sham now, and the wrong people who do nothing to create and deliver the music make the profit, while the real artists pay the worst price of working hard. Musicians are forced to beg people with GoFundMe and Patreon campaigns and very often die broke in this weak new type of Internet music economy. Plain and simple. Music needs a new reasonable delivery model, and we need to stop supporting monopolistic communities for content they don't make nor promote fairly while they totally rip the true OC creators off. I have no relation to OP, nor the platform cited... I'm just a musician that has been through the storm.
jrm4 5y ago
The intent is great, but this isn't going to happen. I'm a big Spotify hater, frankly -- but one thing they understand is that the marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero. It's weird to pretend that it isn't -- and it's REALLY weird to promise that you're going to automatically lose more money the more you listen to a song. I think there's legs in the idea of "hey, you've listened to this a bunch, would you like to pay more (and perhaps get something else)?" But this ain't it.
- dandelany 5y ago
  "marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero" - only if you don't consider royalties to be part of the marginal cost? What's weird to me is the seemingly pervasive idea that the cost of everything should be 100% directly related to its marginal cost + some small fixed percent. Things are priced based on what consumers will pay, which is related to how much value they derive from it. Personally I'd be happy to pay $2 a month when I don't listen to much music and up to $30-40/month when I'm obsessed with album(s) and listening to them every day - how much that costs Spotify is somewhat irrelevant to me
  - jrm4 5y ago
    No, royalties are objectively not part of the marginal cost, by definition. Marginal cost refers to things that must be paid for before the thing is made. This isn't a "should," it's essentially a principle of "the science of economics" (which isn't always much of a science, but this one holds up pretty well over time.) The one that doesn't is the bit about "how much value they derive from it." All sorts of real-life experimentation/psychology, etc shows that people don't much know or understand or generally follow this thing of "a person develops a sense of how much something is worth to them and makes purchases accordingly," I mean, a moment's thought reveals that if this were true, advertising (and perhaps, google and facebook et als entire business models) wouldn't exist. I have idiosyncratic music preferences like you, but we much don't matter.
- anchpop 5y ago
  I listen to music for at least 3 hours per day. Assuming two minute songs, that’s 2700 songs per month. Since my spotify subscription is $10/month, that’s about 0.3 cents per song. I’m curious if I listen to much more music than average or what. I often hear that spotify is underpaying artists with complaints like “less than a penny for stream” (google says the average is 0.4 cents), but it doesn’t seem like spotify could be taking a huge cut off the top
itisit 5y ago
> It's also about resisting the urge to treat music as nothing more than audio wallpaper. Having music on doesn’t require an active listening experience, nor should it. And if I really want to engage with an artist, I’m going to see them live or buy their work on a medium I own whose playback I control. Sorry, but for me this stream credit system would be more of a pain than a benefit.

dang 5y ago

A couple small past threads: Resonate – A community-owned music network - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20827361 - Aug 2019 (5 comments) Resonate – a cooperatively owned streaming music service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11283175 - March 2016 (2 comments)

0des 5y ago

> Our unique Stream2own model splits the cost of a digital download into 9 plays. > Plays start off cheap when you're discovering and as you fall in love with a song, you come to pay the full price. > There's no transition out of Resonate to buy a song or album. Purchase it directly, or just keep listening. > Resonate pays artists directly and per-play. For listeners, the overall cost is similar to that of the average monthly streaming subscription. I'd be interested in seeing how the 9 plays number was derived, or a deeper discussion or article more than what's on the linked page. This is an interesting model, I hope it works out the way the creators intended.

peteratomic 5y ago
TBH I just liked the number 9. Subtle Beatles reference I guess. But the model also reflects the process of falling in love with an artist or an album, meaning the payout to the artist goes up the more I repeat listen.

agluszak 5y ago

The idea seems sweet. I registered immediately, but the catalog seems to be pretty empty for now. For me the biggest feature is being able to write a new client. Oh, how I wish Spotify or Tidal had open APIs...

nivenkos 5y ago
There are alternative Spotify clients, and it has an API.
peteratomic 5y ago
Once the User API is launched (expected in Dec 21) then we'll finally be able to automate profile and catalog creation for the many distributors standing by. Expecting 20-50X in catalog size then.

nyanpasu64 5y ago

Hmm, you have to pay to become a member, and additionally pay for each song you listen (if you exceed the "new user" credits). Can you sign up as a listener and an artist? I tried but it says "This username is already registered" and "This email address is already registered".

satellites 5y ago
Paying to become a co-op member is optional. Not required for listening. The latter seems like an issue though. It would be great to be able to convert a listener account into an artist account, or to have both under one account entity.
peteratomic 5y ago
We're about to launch an long-anticipated User API which is going to solve this double account type problem (listener + artist + etc). Supposed to drop in December. And the other comment is correct... co-op membership is optional.

missedthecue 5y ago

Unless I want to engage in charity, why would I use this over Spotify or Apple music?

agluszak 5y ago
Because you pay only for what you listen to and you can use an open API?
siquick 5y ago
So artists get paid?
- bscphil 5y ago
  I have nothing against charity, but isn't that just charity under a different description?
  - patrickyeon 5y ago
    Paying a fair price to sustain something you want to see continue to exist isn't charity. Paying the lowest price you possibly can nearly always means someone along the way was exploited and not given a fair share of the value they created.
    - bscphil 5y ago
      > Paying the lowest price you possibly can nearly always means someone along the way was exploited No, I agree with that. But that's still engaging in charity, right? Voluntarily paying more for something that I could pay less for, so that artists will have a living wage, workers won't be exploited, etc etc. Your "sustain something you want to see continue to exist" suggests something else, though. What it suggests is that I have a good practical reason, on the basis of wanting to see good music continue to be created, to personally pay more for music. I think this is incorrect. If I was of the opinion that only a few artists made really great music, it might make sense to exclusively fund them so that they would continue doing so. But that's not the case: music is an extremely cheap commodity these days, because high quality production is so easy (can even be done with free or cheap software on an old laptop). There's enough good music put out there for free by people just doing it as a hobby to last a lifetime. You can't compete with that; a "fair share" of nothing is still nothing. Similar problem for Uber drivers: when there are too many drivers, the cost per ride gets driven through the floor. That's true regardless of whether Uber are exploiting their drivers (they probably are). I was evasive in my original reply, so let me put my cards on the table. I do think that voluntarily paying more for something than it is worth (its fair market price) is charity. And I don't think it is practicable to fix the problems with artist remuneration by encouraging everyone to be charitable. And I think it's a bit ludicrous to try to commandeer the word "fair" to mean something other than the market price, if you're not going to reconsider the more fundamental assumptions behind having a market in the first place. I would argue that if you want music to flourish, in something like its present democratized form, you need to do just that. Music should be understood as a human good - both creating and listening to it. All music is good, even bad music. All musicians should be supported, even those whose music wouldn't be popular enough to earn a living wage at the market price. Recall that even the Beatles were supposedly on the dole at one point. On the other hand, we could decide that music is simply not all that valuable to us, that creating more music than anyone can reasonably consume does not promote any particular human good, and let the current proliferation of music die. That's also a valid outcome. What isn't valid, to my way of thinking, is valuing music and then thinking that charity ought to be our way of responding to that value.

throw10920 5y ago

Practically, how is this better than my current local music library & player? "INEQUITIES have been exacerbated." - yikes, no thanks.

puppycodes 5y ago

you lost me at pay per play... also your pricing page doesnt actually give a sense of cost at all? 9 plays per what? 5 euro? 10 dollars? .0000005 eth?

phailhaus 5y ago
The pricing page gives prices in terms of "credits", their FAQ [1] includes the actual conversion rate: 1 credit ~= $1.49. That makes listening to a song the first time cost a bit less than 0.3 cents, and after 9 plays you will have paid the full cost of ~$1.50 [1] https://stream.resonate.coop/faq https://stream.resonate.coop/faq
siquick 5y ago
> also your pricing page doesnt actually give a sense of cost at all? 9 plays per what? 5 euro? 10 dollars? .0000005 eth? This is a huge oversight. Resonate is a good idea in theory but the majority of people who really care about independent artists getting paid properly for digital music (which seems to be the main purpose behind Resonate) are supporting artists by buying from Bandcamp, rather than solely streaming. Its kind of telling that Resonate has been around for 7 years yet the database is 13,000 songs. In my experience artists and labels will upload their music anywhere that will get them plays/pays. Not saying that Bandcamp is perfect but it really resonates (sorry) with artists and labels. Hopefully Resonate can get it right because we need more people to become comfortable with paying for music again.
- Kye 5y ago
  For comparison: my own library of songs [0] is 127, and I'm not particularly prolific. That's just short of 1% of their library. Bandcamp has at least 100 people more prolific than I am. [0] https://vibrafox.bandcamp.com/ https://vibrafox.bandcamp.com/
  - siquick 5y ago
    Yeah there is a lot of music on there. The artist index [0] has 492 artists on each page and there are 3734 pages - safe to say that each artist has at least 1 track uploaded. [0] https://bandcamp.com/artist_index https://bandcamp.com/artist_index

satellites 5y ago

This seems really cool. Its aim should not be to usurp Spotify (will never happen since major record labels are entrenched in Spotify now). Rather, I could see this as an alternative to Bandcamp or other similar indie music sites. I actually like the pay-per-play model personally even though that might irk some people. I'm interested to see how the pricing shakes out for an audiophile type who consumes lots of music.

winternett 5y ago
Platforms should make money off ad revenue and prime placements and be happy with that. Radio sustained itself, along with the major music industry for many many years without needing to charge listeners and musicians for the music, and so did TV. Back then, we found epic music a lot more than now... Now we're duped into the false belief that somehow Spotify, while making record profit year after year paying artists $0.0000001 cent per stream is reasonable? This economy will bankrupt everyone who is not in their engineered and very controlled food chain if we give them subscription money just to listen to sponsored playlists that we can find and listen to elsewhere for free if we look hard enough. Tons of great musicians are putting out music on YouTube for free, and many other places, but the lazy attitude of only paying attention to charts, and letting playlists dictate what succeeds is really killing music because the money pipeline is locked down by the big industry, and it only pushes sterile and engineered music, not real honest music by naturally talented musicians. It's a sham now, and the wrong people who do nothing to create and deliver the music make the profit, while the real artists pay the worst price of working hard. Musicians are forced to beg people with GoFundMe and Patreon campaigns and very often die broke in this weak new type of Internet music economy. Plain and simple. Music needs a new reasonable delivery model, and we need to stop supporting monopolistic communities for content they don't make nor promote fairly while they totally rip the true OC creators off. I have no relation to OP, nor the platform cited... I'm just a musician that has been through the storm.

jrm4 5y ago

The intent is great, but this isn't going to happen. I'm a big Spotify hater, frankly -- but one thing they understand is that the marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero. It's weird to pretend that it isn't -- and it's REALLY weird to promise that you're going to automatically lose more money the more you listen to a song. I think there's legs in the idea of "hey, you've listened to this a bunch, would you like to pay more (and perhaps get something else)?" But this ain't it.

dandelany 5y ago
"marginal cost of streaming OR downloading a song is effectively zero" - only if you don't consider royalties to be part of the marginal cost? What's weird to me is the seemingly pervasive idea that the cost of everything should be 100% directly related to its marginal cost + some small fixed percent. Things are priced based on what consumers will pay, which is related to how much value they derive from it. Personally I'd be happy to pay $2 a month when I don't listen to much music and up to $30-40/month when I'm obsessed with album(s) and listening to them every day - how much that costs Spotify is somewhat irrelevant to me
- jrm4 5y ago
  No, royalties are objectively not part of the marginal cost, by definition. Marginal cost refers to things that must be paid for before the thing is made. This isn't a "should," it's essentially a principle of "the science of economics" (which isn't always much of a science, but this one holds up pretty well over time.) The one that doesn't is the bit about "how much value they derive from it." All sorts of real-life experimentation/psychology, etc shows that people don't much know or understand or generally follow this thing of "a person develops a sense of how much something is worth to them and makes purchases accordingly," I mean, a moment's thought reveals that if this were true, advertising (and perhaps, google and facebook et als entire business models) wouldn't exist. I have idiosyncratic music preferences like you, but we much don't matter.
anchpop 5y ago
I listen to music for at least 3 hours per day. Assuming two minute songs, that’s 2700 songs per month. Since my spotify subscription is $10/month, that’s about 0.3 cents per song. I’m curious if I listen to much more music than average or what. I often hear that spotify is underpaying artists with complaints like “less than a penny for stream” (google says the average is 0.4 cents), but it doesn’t seem like spotify could be taking a huge cut off the top

itisit 5y ago

> It's also about resisting the urge to treat music as nothing more than audio wallpaper. Having music on doesn’t require an active listening experience, nor should it. And if I really want to engage with an artist, I’m going to see them live or buy their work on a medium I own whose playback I control. Sorry, but for me this stream credit system would be more of a pain than a benefit.