For context: I recently set up a Funkwhale instance for Communick subscribers, where people can upload their music collection, stream on mobile/web and share with their friends. That's useful already and can be thought of as a replacement to the original Google Play Music, but I guess that those with large music collections will either just play from their dedicated devices or self-host a service like Navidrome.

So I'd like to make my instance a bit more interesting by building tools for (a) musicians wishing to connect with their audience and use the space to showcase their own work and (b) people who want to support independent musicians but don't want to commit paying a few dollars every month to lots of different people - the main complaint about Patreon after all is that those little contributions end up amounting to a lot of money.

In terms of funding, what I'd like to do is let users set up a fixed monthly budget (say $10-$25 per month) to be split between all the artists that are enrolled in the platform, however they want. One user might decide to get 100% of my budget and give to one artist, another might choose to give 10% to one and 1% to 90 other musicians. In the end of the month, the system would tally up everyone's contributions and make the payout accordingly.

I wouldn't even have to take a cut of these donations, because my business model already has revenue by simply providing the service.

Is this something that you'd see yourself using? I know that Bandcamp is king in this space, but with the recent changes maybe there is an opportunity to get more artists and supporters to the Fediverse.

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[–] enduranceracing@communick.news 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I like the overall idea in theory, but as others have said, it's all in the implementation. I think the UI will be very important on the page that controls the contribution to the artists. I think you should have 2 "shortcut" buttons - "Pay Supported Artists by My Play %" and "Pay all artists equally" and then have some sort of vertical equalizer sliders with each supported band having a slider representing a custom contribution setting. I think that would work ok for people who want to tweak their contributions, at least for people with a small amount of supported bands. You could also specify a time frame for the first button... Year/Quarter/Month etc. The main question... what is the default setting? Is it equal to start, based on play percentage, or does the UI force you to try out custom contributions at first?

I don't think having users putting in percentages is a viable option. Alternatively to the aforementioned ideas, I think a 1-5 star ranking system would be useful, and then the percentages would be derived from that, on the backend. (with a FAQ and such available explaining the % correlation)

[–] rglullis@communick.news 2 points 8 months ago

I think you should have 2 “shortcut” buttons

Yeah, I think having sensible defaults would make a lot of sense and it is not hard to implement.

UI-wise, I'd try to implement a page where you can see all the artists you want to support, and each of one them would get a slider scale. It's (relatively) easy to program it in a way that the payout distribution percentage is preserved even if you add/remove artists.