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Thanks for the summary. I wish them luck with the more open approach and hopefully they will publish more at some point. I only looked quickly but the part ab

Thanks for the summary. I wish them luck with the more open approach and hopefully they will publish more at some point. I only looked quickly but the part about artists and labels is not sufficient. On Bandcamp, individual albums can be listed by an artist but on a particular label with a small link to the label. It appears in the list of albums for the label and for the artist. This dynamic is very important for finding indie music and, as far as I can tell without being in the industry at all, artists often want to work with different people on the production as well as marketing side and everyone benefits. It often isn't the case that artists pick one label and stick with them for a while, they may have one or more that they release with more often but also do one off releases with other labels and self publish some albums or tracks. I don't know how it works behind the scene but I assume artists generally don't want all the labels that they release on to be able to edit everything, the labels should be restricted to editing the album released on that label unless additional permission is given. Of course, it makes sense for indiehd to start with the simpler cases (and it is wonderful that they are so open about what they are doing) but hopefully they are working on the more complex relationships needed to support the indie scene.

gen220 5y ago
Yeah, I built out some models for this as a weekend project, based on my limited knowledge as a bandcamp consumer. It's a surprisingly-complex domain! Simply modelling all of the relationships is a fun experiment. i.e. so-and-so is the producer and advertised co-artist, so-and-so is both an individual artist but also a member of bands X and Y, bands X and Y are part of the super-group Z; label A is a subsidiary of B, which was a subsidiary of label C from 2012-2016, was independent from 2016-2017 and is a subsidiary of label D from then until now. Now, think about building RBAC on top of this, like you're hinting at! No small feat, to be sure. edit: The main rabbit-hole I dove down was revenue-sharing, so that labels and artists can be paid out immediately, without the latter needing to wait for some settlement layer governed by the label. It turns out Stripe allows you to implement this fairly easily, and with limited fuss! Even if the label chooses not to use this process for some reason (I wonder why!), you should be able to model out revenues for all parties, and show the artist(s)/song-writer(s)/label(s) what they should have had in gross and post-tax earnings for any given period in time. You can even show the music consumer what % of each purchase will go to the various parties involved in producing the music, which might help in steering people towards indie labels or artists. Kind of like nutrition facts for music. :)
- joveian 5y ago
  Showing what % goes to the various parties would be nice, although that can get even more complicated if you break out things like royalty payments for sampled music or individual band member portions. And without some kind of enforcement mechanism some people will just lie about it while it might be hard to get anyone to sign up if there is a penatly for incorrect information, unless it is an optional thing. Also I noticed the indiehd FAQ mentioning transfer fees can eat up most or all of a payment when sending small amounts of money, so the amount received also depends on how much they make in any particular period. I also once had a small label ignore or forget about Bandcamp for maybe a year and a half after I ordered a CD from them, I'm guessing some kind of email issue that caused them to not receive notifications, but any information that could change is unlikely to be kept up to date (as always :/). Direct payments or at least accounting sounds like a good feature, there do unfortunatly seem to always be people trying to rip off the people doing the actual work (I've heard of that being a significant issue in the game industry as well). Good luck if you decide to work more on it!

gen220 5y ago

Yeah, I built out some models for this as a weekend project, based on my limited knowledge as a bandcamp consumer. It's a surprisingly-complex domain! Simply modelling all of the relationships is a fun experiment. i.e. so-and-so is the producer and advertised co-artist, so-and-so is both an individual artist but also a member of bands X and Y, bands X and Y are part of the super-group Z; label A is a subsidiary of B, which was a subsidiary of label C from 2012-2016, was independent from 2016-2017 and is a subsidiary of label D from then until now. Now, think about building RBAC on top of this, like you're hinting at! No small feat, to be sure. edit: The main rabbit-hole I dove down was revenue-sharing, so that labels and artists can be paid out immediately, without the latter needing to wait for some settlement layer governed by the label. It turns out Stripe allows you to implement this fairly easily, and with limited fuss! Even if the label chooses not to use this process for some reason (I wonder why!), you should be able to model out revenues for all parties, and show the artist(s)/song-writer(s)/label(s) what they should have had in gross and post-tax earnings for any given period in time. You can even show the music consumer what % of each purchase will go to the various parties involved in producing the music, which might help in steering people towards indie labels or artists. Kind of like nutrition facts for music. :)

joveian 5y ago
Showing what % goes to the various parties would be nice, although that can get even more complicated if you break out things like royalty payments for sampled music or individual band member portions. And without some kind of enforcement mechanism some people will just lie about it while it might be hard to get anyone to sign up if there is a penatly for incorrect information, unless it is an optional thing. Also I noticed the indiehd FAQ mentioning transfer fees can eat up most or all of a payment when sending small amounts of money, so the amount received also depends on how much they make in any particular period. I also once had a small label ignore or forget about Bandcamp for maybe a year and a half after I ordered a CD from them, I'm guessing some kind of email issue that caused them to not receive notifications, but any information that could change is unlikely to be kept up to date (as always :/). Direct payments or at least accounting sounds like a good feature, there do unfortunatly seem to always be people trying to rip off the people doing the actual work (I've heard of that being a significant issue in the game industry as well). Good luck if you decide to work more on it!