Subvert – Collectively owned music marketplace

I think this is great, but I do hope thought is being put into solving the hardest problem of all IMHO: Music Discovery

I have bought a lot on Bandcamp, but would have bought 10x more if I could just find stuff I liked. The existing system makes discovery nearly impossible unless you happen to like the stuff being mainly bought and curated or are in a lucky genre.

Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the music people create sucks. This may not seem true if you mainly listen to "radio" and playlists, but if you ever get access to a large catalog of independent music, try picking stuff at pseudo-random and take notes. As much as I love good art (and I do), most art is not good art. You can't go on popularity because some of the great artists (especially on Bandcamp) are relatively unknown and therefore are not popular. For example, Thousand Needles in Red is a phenomenal band with great albums, and almost completely unknown. These Four Walls is similar (but at least they are on Youtube Music/Spotify/etc). I'd buy the crap out of similar albums, but discovering them is very challenging. I mainly found those two out of random luck.

Anyway I'm rambling, but I do hope you can figure out a good means for discovery. I think finding and grouping people with similar tastes is among the best ways, and also having artists that a person likes recommend other artists can be super valuable.

That's interesting that you say discovery is hard on Bandcamp. I've actually found their blog content great at finding new artists. Their editorial staff seems to be really tuned in and articles like this make me very happy:

https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/aphex-twin-selected-ambient...

That's very simple...

a) Find good DJs playing music you like (YouTube is very helpful here, as is partying)

b) Listen to their sets

c) Shazam (or just trainspot) the tracks you like. (Shazam has a really nice integration with SPotify that dumps everything it IDs into a Spotify playlist)

I am a DJ and constantly on the hunt for new music, this is how I find most of it. No algorithms necessary!

I run a self-learning music discovery engine called Gnoosic:

https://www.gnoosic.com

I can confirm that when you suggest a random band to a random user, they will dislike it with over 90% probability.

I'd be interested to hear how well Gnoosic works for your musical taste.

That only works for a subset of music. It works well for electronica. It works less well for singer songwriters.

Sorry for what's probably a stupid question, but how do you find DJs on Youtube? Do you literally just search for stuff like "Hard Rock DJ" and then start clicking through results?

Neat, thank you! I'll definitely give it a shot and see how it goes.

Discoverability of anything outside of the main stream is always difficult.

I listen to a sub-sub-genre of an already niche sub-genre (raw black metal) where it takes A LOT of work to pick out the small amount of good from the large amount of bad. Many of these bands are NOT on any major platforms except for bandcamp.

There are a few review blogs that highlight some of the top stuff (although, most of the reviews are at the black metal level, not the sub-sub-genre), but I find my main source of discovery is bandcamp.

What I do is: 1) Follow LABELS on bandcamp that specialize solely in the music from bands I like, 2) follow other users that have a similar purchase history, 3) and of course follow your favorite bands for updates.

My biggest issue with bandcamp is that I find their notification system and wishlist to be quite lacking.

For notifications and discoverability, I take all the notification emails I get, filter them based on type (new release, new items [gear,stickers,vinyl], and general message updates) and move them into my RSS system (FreshRSS)[0]. I get new music updates every day of things I probably want to at least check out.

For wishlist management, I wrote a simple desktop app[1] that lets me rate, tag, comment, and listen to my albums from my bandcamp wishlist quickly. Anything I _might_ be interested in, I put in my wishlist, then use my app to keep track of if I like it or not. Stuff I don't like stays in my wishlist, but gets a low rating and filters to the bottom while stuff I want to purchase filters up to the top.

Don't get me wrong, you are still going to need to spend time exploring, as you aren't getting your weekly curated playlists.

   [0] https://blog.line72.net/2021/12/23/converting-bandcamp-email-updates-to-an-rss-feed/
   [1] https://line72.net/software/camp-counselor/

Wow. Simple user interface, fas and it gives interesting results! It did not find two of my favorite groups, gusgus and subgud, but I added a suggestion. Bookmarking this for later use!

I wonder if they'd be better off creating a collectively-owned record label. Small independent labels do still exist, and I can imagine them leveraging the discovery mechanisms built into streaming platforms, etc., and also having a store front for merchandise / physical media (which would be great for co-promoting the bands in the co-op).

Both those bands go hard and I'd never heard of either. In the spirit of your last paragraph, if you have any other favorites, I'd love to hear them!

I assume there will be some energy within the cooperative to establish some shared means of production. It seems probable.

They discuss this in their blog post about how additional industries could be part of this co-op: like labels, studios, housing co-ops, vinyl pressing plants, venues, professional services, and credit unions.

https://subvert.fm/blog/our-50-year-roadmap-the-mondragon-of...

> As much as I love good art (and I do), most art is not good art.

Are you sure you're talking about "good art" and not merely "professionally mixed and mastered recordings?"

This is what DJs and record labels are for. As I've pointed out many times before, the very understandable hostility of the public toward major labels that inflict inequitable terms on artists early in their career has been applied to dismiss all labels in favor of platforms. Small independent labels actually do a ton to support and build up artists outside of mainstream genres, while many (most?) platforms are as bad as major labels in their own way. Imagine if you went to the record store in the pre-internet days, and they were giving away singles or whole albums for free, but there were ads mixed in with the music and if you tried to move the needle/forward the cassette past them, they'd break your hifi.

But there are so many channels that specialize in that sort of thing, NPR Tiny Desk being the most mainstream online curator. Also lyrics sites, if the singer-songwriter isn't completely marketing shy.

Band level doesn't quite work. Alas, it needs to be track level. There are a lot of bands where I like a track and that's it.

My favorite example is Seven Sirens And a Silver Tear from Sirenia, a Norwegian gothic metal band. There's no metal in that. It took me a long long time before I learned this but the track is a direct descendant of the Midlight Sonata. And I was hunting for similar songs and I now keep a playlist of them -- but if you started from Sirenia you would never find any of them.

Here AI might be useful, I am not saying maroofy is perfect but it's worth a try. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635352

It's one of the few uses where if the AI is wrong? oh well.

> Discoverability is especially hard because 99% of the music people create sucks

This - as a listener, quality is the hard problem. It is encouraging that the proposal affirms the value of curative functions (like labels).

As an artist, I actually don’t really care about music’s commercial problems - I’m more annoyed by the constraints on musical art objects inherent in all music platforms.

Like, experiencing art objects in a gallery hits different vs scrolling through bandcamp. The internet is, already, the gallery but it’s like we replaced all of the paintings with tiny prints, eclipsed by the placards.

The thing I would really love is a music platform that feels like a hosting platform, not a marketplace. Where a user can simultaneously act as a listener, an artist, a curator or a critic.

Spotify has a few mechanisms for discovering music and I find that they largely work for me. I also listen to interviews with random artists to get exposed to music I am not aware of.

What is the approach, on a concrete, technical level, that you are taking to make recommendation N, based on the 3, 4...N-1 choices?

Do you think online NNMF collaborative filtering with Spotify bands with fewer than 100,000 monthly listeners is the answer? If you had infinite resources, what would you do?

Did you install malware on my computer ;) How did it manage to predict so much of what in my collection with just 3 names ?

I think I have seen folks use rateyourmusic.com to get partway there already...

> The thing I would really love is a music platform that feels like a hosting platform, not a marketplace. Where a user can simultaneously act as a listener, an artist, a curator or a critic.

I'm surprised at this. I find music discovery easy. Some tips:

On Bandcamp: in addition to obviously following artists I like, I follow several fan accounts of those artists, then I can see what they buy. I also try to sample the Bandcamp album of the day.

On NTS.live I have a bunch of favourite hosts and try to listen to every show they release, and note the track listing. Too many to ever get through.

Podcasts: NPR All Songs Considered, and Resident Advisor when I can.

On Apple Music there's the algorithm. Hit or miss.

Back in the heydays of music blogs I would find a lot of great stuff on Hype Machine, but alas, I think those days are gone.

Just with these few sources I find there is far too much great new music to get through in one lifetime. Godspeed!

What's wrong with discovering good art out of random luck?

I have discovered at least as much good music on Bandcamp as I did in the early years of Beatport and before that in real-life record stores. You start with a genre you like, then just flick through all the new releases. If a cover or title catches your eye, pop it in and have a listen, if you don't like it, move on to the next. Maybe you missed a bunch of good stuff because it didn't catch your eye, but who cares? The point isn't to collect every amazing piece of music ever written, it's just to buy enough music that makes you happy.

After a while you might start to build up a mental map of which labels tend to release more stuff you like so you prioritize listening to their new releases over other labels. Or you find an artist you like and follow them onto different labels. Even indie artists who self-release everything often still do collabs with other artists, so you can find connected/related stuff that way too, or look at the way they self-describe and tag their own music then search round for those keywords too.

In my opinion it's much easier to discover music now than it was in the brick and mortar days primarily because of hyperlinks and search, but also because the new releases rack doesn't get cleaned out by the early birds, records aren't held behind the counter for favorite customers etc. Not to mention Discogs is still there for more mainstream stuff to drill down on aliases, guest appearances, producers etc. Every Bandcamp Friday I end up with a full cart and dozens of open tabs and it feels like an embarrassment of riches. I wouldn't know what to do with a recommendations engine on top of that.

I am thrilled with my music collection these days, it's got everything from janky noodlings by bedroom musicians who I was perhaps the only person who they ever got a sale from, to established artists with a couple decades of releases under their belts, to weird little microscenes centered around cities or countries I'll never visit. Sure, I dug through a ton of trash to get there, sometimes checking out reams of tracks by a promising artist only to find a single gem worth tossing over a few bucks for, but now I have it, and I treasure it! I love having a personalized collection that's entirely made up of tunes that I think are awesome. It's the fulfillment of teenage me's dream. I don't think discovering 10x as much music would make it any better - on the contrary, I wouldn't have time to really focus on and appreciate it all, in which case I might as well have just put a streaming playlist on in the background.

This. There are many, many artists who I only own one or two tracks of - including some of the most-played tracks in my collection - because the vast majority of their other output is not my taste at all. If finding good music was as simple as just buying everything that a single artist put out, it would be much easier to build a collection.

The good news is that in the digital era you no longer need to fork over cash for an entire album or even an EP when you only care about one of the songs - which leaves more money available to buy music from other artists. I often wonder if in the long run it still balances out for artists, since the songs one person likes probably aren't the same as the songs another person likes, especially in niche genres.

I tried it before, and I just tried it again. It is great. I just came back from RecSys a large conference on recommender systems. Researchers and companies like Spotify, Amazon music, Deezer gave lots of presentation. However, nothing they showed were so immediately useful as this. Awesome service!

If the track is known, then from the context of this and other things you like, you would still reach useful recommendations in not too many clicks. Track level would be interesting, but is also harder as data is a lot sparser making it harder to build reliable recommendations.

It's a limited field of one person, but John Peel (BBC dj) sure introduced me to so much. Never found anything like the show for making me realise how much music I was missing...so thought fuck it...can't listen to everything, so I won't bother trying. I write my own music for me. It's on a yt channel (no images), so if anyone does discover it all....it's yours. And everyone elses.

This is incredible!

I wish I could give it more bands, and see the distance (I imagine it computes one?) between each band I provided and the ones it suggests.

Some interesting suggestions. However, from a number of starting points I was pointed as "Songraes", a band that doesn't seem to rate it's own Wikipedia article. I wonder if this has been "fixed" somehow?