Fairplayer, Carles Barrobes - Rethinking Music Distribution for Independent Artists - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast (Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi and welcome to another episode of Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom Ray and this is a podcast where I talk to musicians, people, that create things for musicians, with a focus on open source and federated and Creative Commons sort of realms. And the person on the show today that I’m talking to is not only creating things for musicians, but it does have a federated sort of connection to it. So why don’t you tell the people who you are and what it is you do?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, okay. thanks for having me. My name is Carles Barrobes I live in Barcelona in Catalonia. We. I’m. I’m part of, well, me myself, I’m a software engineer who has doubled in music, has at some point in time spent a lot of money in music tuition that didn’t go anywhere. But, and I’m part of a collective that is, organizing around building tools for musicians so they can leave the main streaming platforms but still have a service that they can point their listeners to and where hopefully someday we can have listeners fund the musicians and contribute to create, some sort of, local scene vibe where you can get a more direct connection between the people who enjoy music and the artists that make that music. in a nutshell, so the tool itself or the project, the technological side of the project, we call it Fairplayer It’s part of this larger organization where there’s various legs, let’s say to the organization, some part of it is more the political side, activism in the music space, trying to get the local musicians that have political sensitivity to, into organizing and doing things collectively. Then there’s another bit which is us, the tech people who like to build tools and who enjoy just making software that other people can use. And then there’s the more, let’s say the cooperative side of things where people are organizing now into building a cooperative that ultimately is going to be what governs this whole thing.
Tom Ray: Okay. And so now with this, I want to learn more about that and about the connection of this because this is not the first time I’ve heard a similar story in, people building software for music. And I’ve recently had on people who have been using Gancio and talked to me about the origins of that. I’ve not yet been able to get Gancio on the show. I’ve tried to contact them. I can’t get anyone from there on the show. But, one would this be why when you look up fairplayer, there are two different locations for something called Fairplayer There’s a Fairplayer IO and then a Fairplayer band.
Carles Barrobes: No, Fairplayer IO has nothing to do with us.
Tom Ray: I didn’t think so, because I was like, that looks different.
Carles Barrobes: No, it’s funny because a few months after we started writing the. The app and working on this project, somebody pointed at this player IO and the first thing, it felt like, okay, someone has just wipe coded an app. It felt like, I don’t know. We don’t know exactly what’s behind that, but, it’s a very, very, very different.
Tom Ray: I went to that first when I was looking it up the first time, and even looking at it, I’m like, the Fairplayer IO, I’m like, I don’t understand what’s going on here. I literally, looking at the site, I’m like, it looks like it’s made to look interesting, but after a couple of seconds I’m like, I don’t know what this is. So I went to the other one and I’m like, oh, now I recognize the logo. This is the one that I’m supposed to be at. You know, I went to the proper one. Yeah, so we will have that one much more. More, you know, talk time. Then let’s move on to yours now. so tell me about creating the organization. I find that interesting. There are different organizations I’ve talked to, and Mirlo is that way too. They also came from a co, op background. And. And so I find this interesting. So tell me a bit about how it’s going from the music side and the tech side.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, yeah. No, it’s funny that you mentioned Mirlo because we get to know each other in this process of.
Tom Ray: That’s how I heard about you.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, we have very good. We have had actually a very good rapport with Mirlo because we. We have very, very similar ways of thinking about music. and this kind of. We come from the mutual aid movements and, solidarity. And, we also are trying to organize ourselves as a cooperative. I think what we’re trying to do, though, we’re trying to do it a bit differently from what typically you think of as a cooperative. you think of it more as a worker cooperative, where the people who are members of the cooperatives are people who are doing the work. So we’re trying to organize this more around the concept of a consumer cooperative, which is something. I’m not sure if that’s common in the US but, a consumer cooperative would be here. It’s very common for things like Food, for buying local produce, like, I don’t know, agro ecological food and organic food. And people would create these consumer properties where it’s people who want to buy this food and then they create the connections with the producers that grow this, food, based on proximity, and the quality of how they produce the food. So we’re trying to do it like that as a way to on the one hand try to. It feels like there’s musicians I think can have a hard time like and not make a lot of money. And they are victims of these big platforms where kind of they seem to be at the mercy of this big platform for distribution music. And I think we tried to build this in a way that we don’t put, all of the work on the musicians to get out of this. It’s like, okay, we want to set it in a way where it’s people who listen to music. We also want to support musicians who want to get out of these platforms. How can we do it from the other end? So that’s kind of how we’re trying to structure it. So it’s still on early days where I think today I was told they we haven’t yet legally kind of constituted, the co op because we had to write to I don’t know how it’s called in English, but like the main document which is kind of your constitution of your organization.
Tom Ray: Oh, like the mission statement?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, it’s more elaborate, like the legal document that defines what is the governance structure of this organization then. So. And we’re kind of on that. So. But the idea is that once it’s kind of legal exists, we need to like do a big campaign to find people who want to just fund this from the point of view of we are people who want to listen to music in an ethical way and make better connections with the musicians that we support. So it’s kind of the idea of the corporate how want to get this. This different edge.
Tom Ray: Okay. And. All right, so now let’s talk. Let’s talk about the actual, I don’t want to say product, but the actual project. There we go.
Carles Barrobes: Of.
Tom Ray: Of fairplayer itself. Now explain. We’re talking more about the musicians and I guess the end point. But so far we also haven’t discussed, I realize, what fairplayer is. So why don’t you explain the product itself or the project itself.
Carles Barrobes: Yes, that will help. Right? Yeah. So, I can explain what Fairplay is right now and what it wants to be when it grows up. Because I think because the Fairplayer was born just as an experiment of okay if we want. It was at the very beginning of this mobilization where there were still very few people and it was a friend of mine who’s really a more professional musician and we know each other from other projects and so the general idea was if we want to get musicians out of the big corporate streaming platforms, where should we take them to? What should we recommend that these people do? And he’s part of a collective called an artist where they provide tools for artists. They provide hosting of various tools from the Fediverse like Mastodon and peertube and Funk Whale instances so that then artists can have their space in there. So it’s a, it’s, it’s, it’s very, I think well, well run community of artists get together and collectively kind of fund this infrastructure so that they can use these tools. And he was talking mostly about we could bring them to other platforms. There people want to leave Spotify, but then they want to go to other platforms who in the end are the same kind of capitalistic model. So we try to bring them more to these more Free World of the Fediverse or Funk Whales all these kind of things. But we didn’t feel there was something like that looked like this is a player application that really provides a polished experience for a person who wants to listen to music. It looks like some of these tools like can look very complicated. So if I, yes, if I take, if I tell my audience hey go listen to me in Funk Whale they’re going to get confused from day one. Right. So we had this feeling and we’re thinking okay, maybe we can build like something like a simpler client for Funk Whale or something like that. So we started with this discussion how can we be. And then we said why just Funk Whale Let’s, let’s start iterating on the concept and the general idea we came up with was let’s build a decentralized system. Well what you can have is decoupled two pieces or let’s say three pieces. One is the music player. then there are the different, what we call the catalogs which is the places where the music actually lives, the music is hosted. And then what we do is we build a piece in between. We call it the hub or the indexer which basically does. It becomes an aggregator, an index of all these decentralized sites in a way that then you can put a Player on top of that. So this was the general idea. So we were thinking, okay, so we need this kind of player hub, which can be just a piece that you deploy somewhere. And then we could build something like a catalog, which is a tool where people could upload their music simply. And while we’re thinking of that, we also found out about faircamp. Right? And so we and Guillain, a friend of mine, they started building a faircamp for his band and other bands in their collective. And we thought, oh, okay. So we found out there’s already kind of a bunch of people that are hosting the music on their own domains using faircamp. So why not build the proof of concept of what we want to build this decentralized player using Faircamp as the catalogs. So then the idea kind of, solidified into we have the fairplayer, which becomes an index of Faircamp So then the artist, the musician can go. Can register for an accounting fair player, can enter the URL for their faircamp instance, and then we index the faircamp instance. There’s a verification process where we tell you the artist to just add, a verification, tag in your site so that we can actually validate that this is actually your site and not someone else’s.
Tom Ray: I found that interesting that that was part of the process. When I was looking it up, I was like, okay, all right. Instead of just like, oh, just put in your information and then it will go, okay, and reach out to it. It actually goes and verifies the site first. I thought that was an interesting step.
Carles Barrobes: Yes, because we. We’re thinking, I think one important thing for us is consent, because I think especially in this era of AI reading everyone’s things and appropriating everyone’s generated knowledge. Right. there’s a lot of concern about things done without your consent. So we think that consent from the author of the music, from the creator is very important. So how we can build ways to prove that we have the kind of the consent of the site owners to publish. So we think that consent is very important. So a way to prove that people who are adding FairCamps to our site are the owners of the Faircamp domains. I think it’s important because otherwise you could go and just add someone’s music without their consent or proof of that they are willing to put their music in there. Right? So that was really important from day one.
Tom Ray: So basically, in a nutshell, it’s a valid point too. But it’s also interesting because as musicians, we do want to be discovered. But also like right now my music is on. I spoke just last week with someone who’s involved with, or not involved with, but their service connects to a site called Q Buzz or Qobuz or something like that thing I’ve never heard of. And I went there and my stuff is available for sale on there. And I’m like, I don’t know how this got here and where is, If somebody does buy it. Am I getting that? Is this connected to the distributor that I’m using? I’m like, I literally have no idea. Never heard of this site. How is my stuff on there? It could just be the blanket distribution. that, because I do it through Distrokid, that might just be one of the services that uses. So it could be as simple as that. But I, it still was the confusion, like, wait a minute, what’s going on here? So I get that. But at the same time too, it’s like you’re always at first going, yeah, put it everywhere. I want everyone to hear my music. But maintaining that is like, yeah, how do I get paid for that? Okay, continue.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, no, but I think that’s an interesting point and I think we’ll eventually figure out different ways how people, how to make it easier for musicians to not have to upload their music everywhere within the this more. We call it the independent digital music ecosystem. Because what we’re trying to, after having built this kind of proof of concept, which is just a proof of concept, is Fairplayer for Faircamp what we’re aiming for is connecting more pieces from this ecosystem. So now we’re talking to Mirlo and we’re starting to define what are the steps that would take us to integrate with Mirlo and try to do as by defining some protocols that could be standardized. We’re taking a look at the format that was proposed by someone in the community called Fluffy and they proposed this format called Cannis. And we’re looking at this and this looks like a good starting point to try to build this integration and then iterate on this work of refine it if we find it’s missing some things. But try to build this integration in a way that it could be replicated. And then we start talking to other people, I don’t know, Ben from Bandwagon or other people that we have identified in the community that we haven’t yet reached out because time is finite, but eventually want to reach out to everyone who wants to be part of this and become like this network of different services where we can, federate or syndicate music of each other. so that’s kind of the aspiration, like becoming the driver for more connected ecosystem. And then once, once many of these pieces are connected, I think what makes sense is you as a musician, you don’t need to join this world once. Right? So if you join, if you’re. If your home base is Mirlo and that’s where you upload your music, then you upload it to Mirlo And because Mirlo is connected to us and then we’re connected to others, then, automatically in Mirlo you can tell them like you do in your distrokids or, these distributors, you give your consent to redistribute your music in all of these places and then it’s there and you have to only do it once. So that’s kind of the aspiration and we can do this. Also, if your home base is your faircamp, maybe there’s a way that you can add some headers or something, on your Faircamp site, which goes together with. Which would be the expression of your consent for redistribution. Which is kind of similar to the concept of your license. You have license and you have created commons license, which means you can redistribute my music in this way. Maybe you can come up with something a bit more nuanced, that is more details than just this is the license. But also. Okay. And you can also, re index this music in all of these sites, that follow this kind of platform.
Tom Ray: I do like that. So the other thing too, about using faircamp and the great thing about creating a service that’s meant to propel, music is fair camp, what you’re doing is it’s hosted by the artist, the artist owns it. They’re not giving you the, they’re not giving you the music, they’re not uploading it, they’re connecting it. And then you are then utilizing their hosted music. So you’re not. In most other cases you have to upload your music, give it to somebody, and then I’ve had things in the past where I’ve uploaded it to a service. That service got bought out by Live Nation. And somehow a blanket like, hey, all the stuff that’s uploaded, uploaded here is now part of our terms of service agreement. And if it’s used somewhere else, we’re going to like, I’ve literally had them in our name go to a video and go, this is copyrighted. You can’t use it. And it’s like it’s absolutely not copyrighted. It is under Creative Commons. And who told you this? You know, that sort of thing. And I’ve had to go back and forth for that. And that’s always fun. But anyway, I got off point for a second. So Faircamp is a great thing for that. And I like how you use that. But I’m sure you’re also realizing too, I’d like to know how you’re connecting the music to that. Because faircamp does do a randomization of the folder structure for the MP3s and different wav files and other music that it hosts, especially if you upgrade or if you regenerate the site or redo it. So are you running into problems with that?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, that can be challenging because I think the thing is when you upload your music to Faircamp if the structure of the site changes, you would need to re index the site or tell Fairplayer, hey, can you re update the music? So we have found some of these situations where it’s not always the case. I still have to understand fully the algorithm that Fercam uses to genetics randomization, because it doesn’t do it all the time when you do an upload. And we’re also, we’ve also talked to Simon Redd, the author of faircamp, and he’s now working on the new version of faircamp. and we have been, there have been discussions around how can we make faircamp easier to. How can we make it easier for people to read data from faircamp for these kind of uses? as in, could we add post build steps where you can add the post build step that generates a cannabis file or a JSON file that this is kind of catalog of the music that then you can more easily consume. So there are things there that we’re thinking about.
Tom Ray: The easiest solution, but it’s not a requirement for faircamp, is to be able to just use the link to the M3U file. But not everybody generates that. If it was the M3U file when it gets regenerated, you would have the new link every time to the audio. Yeah, but that doesn’t need to be turned on by default, which is unfortunate.
Carles Barrobes: Exactly. No, exactly. I think the challenging thing with Faircamp is that it’s quite highly customizable and people can do things in different ways. And you can have a, ah, label mode or just individual artist mode. So yeah, we had to deal with a lot of edge cases of structures of their cams.
Tom Ray: Right.
Carles Barrobes: And there are different versions of Faircamp and newer versions maybe use a slightly different structure than older versions. So yeah, it’s not been trivial and
Tom Ray: the history of this. And also one of the first, music people building something for musicians, people that I had spoken with was Simon from Faircamp And it’s been interesting watching this play out because I’ve watched the evolution of these thoughts and then many people having similar thoughts. Much like you said, you’re talking to Fluffy, of Cad, Cadmus. I always want to say. There you go. Thank you. I always say it wrong. I apologize for that. And different people who have been working on projects. I just recently spoke with Unstream, who’s also just connecting the streaming services. Brandon and it’s interesting the different sort of things that people discover and putting them all together. Now. One of the original problems that was pointed out in Faircamp when I learned about it was. And Faircamp for people who are listening, who don’t know what it is, it’s a self hosted, free and open source sort of Bandcamp that musicians can put on their own site. Now the thing is, is Bandcamp itself. You go to Bandcamp, you search for a type of music and you find that type of music. While Faircamp it lives on your site. It’s not necessarily discoverable unless you discover the band. So there was a, there was a webring that was built so people could discover more of it. And then now what you’re doing is more of a site where if more people connect to it, it is a good library and player for those musicians. And you’re saying you connect back to them or you’re, you’re giving the link to their Faircamp page so people can discover more about them. But it’s a source for a searchable source. I mean, is that a good starting point? Is that kind of a good reference for what it is as of right now?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, I think it’s you put it very well in the sense that what we do, I think complements very well the solo faircamp side. As in we can do something that makes. Adds up, to the ecosystem in the sense that we bring another piece of something. That would be very hard if you want to discover musicians that have their music in this farecamps, it’s it’s more difficult. You have to browse. You could, you could not do things like, okay, I can create my playlist of music from different athletes on different programs and listen to it, listen to it on the go on my phone. While I’m away. It’s, it’s that this concept of The convenience of helping you as a listener consume and access this music from these people. And also, hopefully, I think, also making it easier to give more affordances in due time for musicians to actually get funding from people listening to their music. because the good thing with faircamp is it’s really simple to manage. It’s a static site. You can upload it, but then it makes certain things much harder, like monetizing your music. and this way I think we can maybe build a layer where people can just support their musicians via for player. And we need to figure it out how we do this through the Playmen. But it’s, I think an important part of something that we thought needed to be solved as well. When we started the project and we’re looking at the Funk whales and all these things in the Fediverse, we’re thinking. But there is, there’s no payment layer here or funding layer that is convenient. Like if I want to pay 10 bucks, ah, a month to support musicians, for example. If I use the faircamp model, I have to go to your site and pay you two bucks and then go to Brandon and pay two bucks. And it’s super inconvenient. And this way we can maybe act as this gateway at some point where, okay, I want to find 10 bucks. And then at the end of the month we can distribute these over the people you listen to or if you’re just fine with, support every artist because I don’t care, as long as we support the ecosystem. So I think we can make this easier with minimizing, bank commissions because you have to do like 20,000 payments.
Tom Ray: So are you talking about a shared sort of system for the artists, kind of like a pool? there used to be a service that was called Flattr. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it, but it was a service where, if you. Well, it was a service where if you joined up with Flattr, and then people who wanted to support artists also joined up with Flattr, you could choose every time you paid Flattr, say Flattr itself. And that’s Flattr because It was web 2.0, so there was no E in it. It was F L A T T R, so you had a button on your site and if people did go, oh, I do like this, I’m going to add them to my Flattr. You paid Flattr $10 a month and what it would do is through the people that you supported. It would distribute evenly to all the people that you added to your Flattr. So you wouldn’t have to go back, check the other thing. You would just support them, pay Flattr directly, not worry about how many people am I paying? Not paying more. You would just have to consider the fact that, oh, the more people you join, you might want to add up. Otherwise, at some point, if I have 10 people, I’m just paying a dollar to each of them. If I’m paying $10 a month or whatever I choose. Anyway, sorry, I was just remembering that service. Anyway, you were talking about monetizing musicians, and I got nostalgic.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But these are the kinds of ideas that I’m. That I’m interested in listening to. Also Brandon, whom you interviewed. I also Brandon Kid Light Bulbs from the interview last week. besides Unstream, he’s also been working on something like this. Like he calls it the Oxbuck, which is a way to support a collective of musicians with just one payment. Right. And it’s designed.
Tom Ray: Wish I would have known that when I spoke with them.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah. Well, now you have an excuse for a second interview. So I think there’s a few of us, who have been thinking or, we are early stages, but have been thinking, about this for longer. The people at Mirlo have been thinking about this for way longer about, solving this, funding artists, models. We’ve been discussing different ways how we could do this. one thing that we’ve also been discussing lately is we could also think of a different model where you can think of Fairplayer because FairPlayer is not just the player instance that runs on FairPlayer band, but you have all of the, Faircamp sites. So you could consider it’s a network of many computers that make up the infrastructure. Right. So we could also think of a model where we think of funding this, not thinking of the royalties model of we pay for musicians to listen to music, but we just fund this collective infrastructure, in the end. So that’s something that we’ve, also been considering as an option. Like if you want to fund the infrastructure, then the concept is you’re paying and we pay to support the nodes that are part of the network. And it’s a different way of thinking of almost the same. But people are paying for the cost of maintaining their own, faircamp, sites. Paying hosting fees for your thing.
Tom Ray: yes.
Carles Barrobes: So that could be another way to look at it. So we want to think of the promotion through different angles. And see what comes up.
Tom Ray: I just had something pop into my head here, and this may be a harebrained idea, this may be a stupid thought, but let me run it by you here. Okay. First of all, question to, kind of know more about on fairplayer. So you’re connecting right now as of the way it is. Right now you’re connecting to the artist’s Faircamp page. Are you then playing the music from, Like, when you play the music in the Fairplayer I’m going to get confused saying Faircamp and Fairplayer when you play it in Fairplayer Player, is it. Is it playing it off of the artist server as of right now, or is this somehow. It is. Okay.
Carles Barrobes: All right. Yes. Yes. So it’s a collectively owned infra. That’s how I like to think about it.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Carles Barrobes: And that’s what I want people to feel like it when they’re joining Fairplayer They’re joining as part of this collective infra. So for sure.
Tom Ray: And it is the. That’s part of the artist consent. And they know it’s not just all of a sudden, like, why are my streaming fe. Or my. My server fees going up all of a sudden.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, exactly. That’s why we think that connected. Yeah, exactly. That’s why we think there’s. There’s. Yeah, it makes sense to come up with ways to compensate with the extra burden that we’re putting on. On your side. Right?
Tom Ray: Yes. And now here’s. That’s a good word. Because here’s the thing that I’m going to say. So the burden of this. And we spoke of this already. There’s individual fair, or, fair camp sites, and there’s not really a way to go, I’d like to hear more of this. And that’s what fairplayer does. Now, here’s the thing I mentioned earlier. I talked about how my music ended up on. I’m always going to say it wrong. Qobuz
Tom Ray: And it was. I’m assuming it’s because right now I use Distrokid as my distributor. I upload new releases on there so it can get to different platforms. Here is the thing that I’m wondering. So. And I viewed this, in an interview that I did with Fluffy, I spoke of a prototype for a music player that was based on Faircamp that I had, been toying around with. And that’s when we talked about, their idea. And I was using Faircamp in my mind as the distributor, as Distrokid, as Tunecore as CD baby. So putting that up there is then going to that. So the. What you would do is you would, And it was more of a fan thing. It was for listeners. And the prototype would be people would discover a Faircamp Camp site, then add it to their. I think I even called it Fairplayer when I was writing the prototype. Fairstream. That’s what I call it, Fairstream, because it was a streaming app and you could just add it. But the thing is, is that would also add it to the library. So it would be searchable. So people would collectively, much like music brainz, be adding this information about different sites. And it would get added, but then it wouldn’t be without consent of the artist. It would be through people finding it and adding it to this stream. But now what I’m getting at is the thought I had is still thinking of Faircamp as the distributor. And you’re saying you’re talking. You’re in talks with Mirlo and you’re working with Ben, Brandon and the. All the other people that we discuss. What would be really nice as a musician, because I have to find these things and then upload them. What if there was an option to go, could you just add these to these services and be part of it? Maybe even check which ones you want describe what they are. So then your music from your Faircamp could be uploaded to these sites. So you end up on Mirlo, not have to set up the account. It would use the information that you have, much like what a distributor would do. And is that a stupid idea? It would be nice as a musician to go, yes, add it to all these so that I don’t have to go and then do it myself. Set up this same information all over again. Is that a dumb idea?
Carles Barrobes: No, no, I think it’s. It’s. It’s not at all a dumb idea. It’s actually when we were talking to Mirlo last week and we’re thinking about. Because now we’re thinking of. About integrating Mirlo as a catalog into a third layer, right? And with them it was exactly this kind of thing that came up. Like, okay, if Mirlo we think Mirlo can be your home base for your music. And then in Mirlo is where you would express your consent of redistribution, which would be exactly what you just said. Like from your Mirlo side, you could say, okay, and this becomes. Mirlo becomes my central point where I express what I want to distribute this music to. And I don’t have to do it myself, right? So Milo can be the place where you say, and I want this to be also on third player and whatever other tool in the ecosystem. So that’s, I think that makes sense because I think what we want to do is also make it convenient. So there’s. It’s funny because this came up on another conversation. This. I think it came up in your conversation with someone else, maybe Brandon, that, I think musicians, in a way, they’re burned up that you have to upload your music to, like, loads of places. Right? But it means that you also have built a habit of doing this, right? It means that, it’s yet another platform. Had be a bit of a burnout, but it’s something that comes so natural to people that it means that they’re so used to doing this that, it’s just tedious. but it’s not a surprise, let’s say. Right? But we would. I think in. In my head, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to. For people to. I think if we think in terms of waste of storage everywhere, like there’s a lot of gigabytes of files that are just duplicated in so many different places when they could live, like in just the one or maybe two for redundancy or something. But you don’t need to have your music in all of these hard drives all over the world, right? So, I think we want to eventually come up with ways to make it simpler. If you’re part of the independent digital music ecosystem, you choose what is your home base, and from there you express where you want this. Where do you authorize or consent your music to be redistributed within this, federation of systems? And there you go, you do it once. And then once things get connected that read this consent, they know if they have access or not. And we figure out a way to make this grow.
Tom Ray: And it would also require a sort of, the word being, where everybody uses the same format, where each of these would have the same information that needs to be filled out, or like a prerequisite of if it is going to be shared with these. Then all of these have to go by this set of, like ID3 tags. You know, you have a set type of ID3 tags. They’re regulated. They even used to be ID2. You know, you can regulate the way it is. Just like with the different RSS formats, the podcast 2.0 formats, like, those are all. So these. It would kind of like activity hub for federation. It would be like, here’s the concept of how this will work to talk to the other services. That’s. That’s kind of what it would need now. And making the choice, being able to do it from each one, I think is important, which you. You touched upon there, too, because one would be like, you’re talking with Mirlo to do this. But also, what if somebody goes, well, what if that’s not the service they want to use? Or what if they don’t want to have a crowdfunding platform? Then it would be like. But you can just do it from fair camp, because that way it’s always owned on your server. You’re not giving the information through a service that. And, you know, knock on wood, could go away. possibly, you know, like, you want it to be something that you will consistently own. So that’s. But that gets into that conversation. That also goes to, like, what Fluffy is talking about, which is more of a regulatory sort of music, RSS specific thing, which would hold the information and that could connect it all. So I’m still just brainstorming here. I’m not even asking questions. We’re just talking. I love this.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think that’s. That’s. That’s much better for me than if you just ask, questions. Because now we’ve been thinking all of this. So we. We’ve started working on some documentation of, Of a plan for what we. What are the different things that we need for making interoperability across all of these platforms and the types of formats and protocols that we need to standardize? And one would be the content, which is where cannabis would, come. Cannabis is a way to express. This is the catalog of musical content on this side. This is one. But there’s the second one, which is what I call the consent. And the consent would be this thing. How do you express, how this music is to be redistributed? What is the license? What do you allow in terms of playback without payment? I don’t know these kind of things. We need to formalize some sort of standard document where, where tools can read this.
Tom Ray: that’s a very good point, too, because there is no way to go. And my music is under Creative Commons. No matter what distributor you go through. I used to use one that when they got taken over by another company, just got rid of it and never. They used to have Creative Commons option, and they were the only one, and that’s why I chose it. And then all of a sudden it went away and it’s like, yeah, yeah,
Carles Barrobes: because the only thing that they had is like your, I don’t know, your musical catalog is the only thing. But that’s why we’re thinking of different layers and there’s another layer which would be around how do we report to each other if we’re doing things like playbacks of the music on your server, how we can report, hey, is this the music that has been listened to in fairplayer and give you a report so that you can know how much your music has been listening? Fairplayer, that would be.
Tom Ray: Or even if those services have the ability to ingest the music from the faircamp so they could host it on theirs so it doesn’t put wear and tear on the the musicians server. Like if they’re willing to take the brunt or especially if they’re a much popular. More popular service.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah. one. One possibility would be in when you express your consent on from your faircamp side. You could also agree to this music to being re uploaded elsewhere for redundancy, for caching.
Tom Ray: I’m uploading the music everywhere right now.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you had your music hosted just on your website. And your website, you get money to compensate for the load on your website
Tom Ray: so that you could pay for compensated. You’re right. That’s the whole point.
Carles Barrobes: I think that would be for me the ideal setup. and then if you go like more several steps beyond once you have established infrastructure, we could think of ways to make this more redundant. I don’t know if your site is down, people can no longer listen to your music. Right. But if we have some sort of redundancy built in where you have your server and Brandon has his and I have mine and we are all part of this ecosystem and then we can build some sort of redundancy where your music is also kind of duplicated in others.
Tom Ray: Okay.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah. so we could eventually like if this thing grows enough and, and it makes sense, we could find ways to make the infra more resilient. Right. But yeah, but we’re going like very far into the future like science fiction around now.
Tom Ray: And it’s good to think forward. It’s always good to future proof. But speaking of that, here is going forward and future proof. I want to ask you one more thing about. About Faircamp today or. Sorry, Fairplayer Player. Damn it. the So while I know I’ve been. I’m in the same circles. We’ve talked to a lot of the same people. I’ve heard a lot of the same discussions, musicians going, this would be nice if streaming and. Or just music on the web in general did this. Now here’s the biggest problem. And much like even with. I mean, Faircamp’s been. Or, sorry, Bandcamp has been around since, like, I don’t know, 2007, something like that, and it hasn’t really gotten to the point where people use it as like, oh, go to my band camp. And everybody goes. I know what that is. Until like, maybe a few years ago. I would say, like, it’s. It’s something where I could even mention it to my mom and she knows what it is. Possibly, you know, but it took a while. And the thing is, is what about the listeners? This doesn’t work if the listeners aren’t adapting it. So are there plans to. After this gets figured out, how it will work to make it accessible to people who just want to listen to music, but they’d like to support indie artists? what’s sort of the plan for. As far as it just being usable to non musicians?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, I. I’m. I’m really not sure where your question is coming from though, but, what do you mean that’s usable for non musicians? As a,
Tom Ray: Like right now, I would say musicians know about Fairplayer And what I’m saying is, what about the people that are listening to my stuff on Spotify? What would make them go, oh, yeah, what do you mean, Spotify and listen to Fairplayer
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, well, yeah, that’s. That’s a big question. Right? I have my point of view and yeah, just everything that I’ve expressed here are my personal opinions, and some are shared by other people in the project. And. But I. I, cannot speak for everyone’s opinions because we’re building this project still. But I, I kind of. I’m averse to the. I know this may sound controversial to some people, but average to the concept that you should go to one place to listen to music and know there’s, I’m thinking more of the, music store from your neighborhood. Right. You would go to buy records and you know that it just is your neighborhood shop and you go to your neighborhood to buy records, and you can buy records from everywhere in the world, and if they don’t have it, you can order it and they can bring it to you. Right. and you could go. And there were many different places where you could go and get the same music. Right. You didn’t have to go to the one single Monopoly brand to buy things. We have normalized Something which is the monopoly, which is the place to go and you have to buy a chair and you go to chairs.com or whatever. So you have to buy something and then you have to go and there’s just one place. I think that’s an aberration and receipt could destroy that. I think. To me the concept is usually had many different places where many different brands, but we’re federated together. And in any of these places you could listen to and support all of the musicians that are part of this network. Right. And it doesn’t have to put like one single place and one single domain and one single brand in the same way, like in, I don’t know, in the Feathers you can use different tools and you go to Mastodon and to go to different instances and you still follow the same people regardless. Right. So you have different entry points to the same information and they can be branded in different M ways. And in this world you could go to Mirlo and from Mirlo you could listen to music that’s not necessarily. And support artists that are not necessarily on that Mirlo site, but they’re part of this federation. Right. And you could go to Fairplayer or eventually Bandwagon or any other tool that comes up. Right. And Fairplayer even third player is a software. You can’t replicate it. You can just host your own instance of a player. We are thinking, for example, I haven’t gone into that at all, but there’s a part of what we’re building with the local community which is supporting the local scene. And as soon as we have this listeners cooperative based in Barcelona, probably the next iteration of the product is going to be we’re going to deploy an instance of your player for the local scene and it’s going to be focused more on features like concerts or merch or contacting your artists or artists in your area or what’s going on, what are the venues where there’s live music and this kind of things. So and with that model, the idea is then we build a model that you can replicate. We have a model, we have set up a site in Barcelona and we have made the effort to contact the musicians in the area to join the platform and then someone else, I don’t know. Where are you based?
Tom Ray: Madison, Wisconsin is where I’m located.
Carles Barrobes: Okay, so let’s say in Madison you decide. Okay, I’m going to set up an instance with all of the artists in Madison. And because I’m good to buddies with all of the artists here, we’re going to set an instance and it’s going to focus on the local scene and it’s going to concerts or whatever. But within there if I just want to listen to music online, stream music, I can federate with the people in Barcelona. And now we’re sharing our catalogs. Now suddenly we have a very locally focused. This is our local record shop that knows the local scene. But you can just listen to music from everywhere. Right. So this is kind of one of the approaches that I think could work with this model of you create different instances and because it’s one, one is the effort of bringing musicians in. Like what’s, what makes it appealing for you being part of that. Maybe it’s being part of a community or scene and it could be I think sometimes in terms of locality.
Tom Ray: I think yeah, I like the locality idea.
Carles Barrobes: But you can think also the same concept, you could apply it in terms of genre. Like I don’t know. You’re big on electronic music. Yeah, we’re big on electronic music and it’s a big international scene. And we decided to set up a site and it’s very focused on electronic music and. Right. And we have. So I, The, the way I see Fairplayer growing as an app you can deploy yourself is it becomes something where you can also kind of curate content and make it your own and have editorial content and your own kind of playlists and your own highlights and people who are working on, on setting up this, I don’t know, you could do reviews of albums or announcements or whatever and whoever take care of the editorial content. They’re focused on a scene. It’s. Be it the local scene, be it the genre or whatever, it could be that you’re very much into some certain types of folklore and trying to get old archives of folklore music recorded on the field. And you have a site that’s very much into that. Right. So you have the tools to do it, you have the way to curate it. But if people are there and just want to listen not just to that content but other music, then reconnect all of this together and together. Because we are well connected with our scenes, with our genres, we have the credibility to bring artists in but within our thing. So we crowdsource the effort of bringing people in platform by attracting them to that one thing. But everybody who listens to music tends to listen to many different genres and people from different places. Right. But there are some people who are really very, very focused and very specialized. So I think we should leverage These types of things. Yeah.
Tom Ray: And I think it sounds a lot too much like what we were saying before. If there’s a standardization that is so good that you can’t ignore it, eventually people will be like, well, why are they able to do that and we can’t. So. And it’s all self owned and decentralized. I like that.
Carles Barrobes: So then the question is like, how do people know where to listen to music? So if you’re an artist within the electronic scene and people know you and you’ll take them to your electronic Fairplayer side and from there they will access all this world. Right. So I think there’s not. There’s no one single place where you take everyone just you take people to places that are matching their like core interest or they’re more. I don’t know. Or the thing that has connected you to them as your. As your audience.
Tom Ray: Right, yeah, for sure. And the. Well, the other thing too is to connect to it. Listen to this, segue this to connect to it. Now how would people join fairplayer or add their music to it? given that they. Right now, the requirement being that they would also need a Faircamp Camp page, but how would they sign up for fairplayer or even just check it out to listen to what’s there?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, well, I, I saw that you created an account on fairplayer upload your. You don’t edit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, we could make it live now on camera. Yeah.
Tom Ray: No.
Carles Barrobes: Okay. So now I think the process is very simple. If you have. Okay, so we have, we started with fairplayer for Faircamp but And, and we have actually for people who wanted to join Fairplayer Player and didn’t have a faircamp in, in Barcelona, we have organized faircamp install parties where people have come and we have showed them how to build their faircamps and some of the artists that are there from the local scene. It’s. It’s because we’ve. Yeah, we’ve managed to help them do that. But so if you already have a fair. What. We’re not trying to promote that as in the make your Faircamp necessarily for people who are not. We’re not trying to push it, let’s say, if you want, if you’re willing to do that, if you’re brave and you’re willing to go that route or you’re ready for some reason you already have a Faircamp it’s just do it and it’s easy. If you don’t, you can either. If you’re brave, you build one. Or if you’re not that brave, you can wait for a bit and then we’ll integrate Fairplay with sub platform like Mirlo or something that allows you to upload your music with more of a UI ah experience that you may be accustomed to. But now if you have your Faircamp or you have been brave enough to create one, the process very simple. You just sign up the verb player and then you’ll access the, what you call the hub, ah in your account and you’re going to have a form that tells you I could share my screen and show you. Actually, would that work for the stream? No, it doesn’t work because we have audio users only. But you have a form which will ask you to add a ah, URL to your Faircamp an optional URL of where people can support you so that in your. So if you have a place where you would like to bring people to support you, be it like your Bandcamp or whatever people or some sort of Patreon or whatever, which is your main point of funding, you can add that URL too and it will appear as a button on your artist page and Fairplayer and just the checkbox saying that you you swear that the music in your website is actually yours or you have the right to distribute it. And then we will go to your URL, we’ll try to read your faircamp, figure out what music is there, what artists, what albums, and we’ll show you that so that you can check that everything looks correct. But then you’re going to have to run the verification process. So it is a guided process where
Tom Ray: we tell you that’s why I didn’t add my music yet because I, I was like, I can’t, I, I didn’t have time to set up my verification.
Carles Barrobes: But, but yeah, no, still if, if you don’t have your verit, you still can like add your Faircamp and actually access, there’s a button to see how it will look in the player and you can see how it would look and only you will see it for, for these non verified artists
Tom Ray: only with the owner until it’s been verified. Okay.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, we don’t publish this verify just to prevent people from publishing other people’s sites without you. but then yeah, and the verification process is really simple. We just give you a snippet of code, that you can add to your catalog. No file from your faircamp. If people are familiar with faircamp, there’s a file that describes your site and then we tell you, just copy this snippet into your site to redeploy your Faircamp and then we’re able to validate this. This code.
Tom Ray: Okay. And also, people should go to faircamp Band to do it.
Carles Barrobes: Fairplayer Player or Fairplayer Player.
Tom Ray: Damn it. I almost did it.
Carles Barrobes: You almost did it? No, no, no. But it happens to me all the time. Like with the Mirlo People make fun of me because I mix up Faircamp Band Camp.
Tom Ray: And it’s worse for you because you’re
Carles Barrobes: the one working Base Camp. Yeah, yeah. And I mix up the other ones. Faircamp Band Camp, and Base Camp basecamp, too.
Tom Ray: Oh, yeah, Yeah. I haven’t used basecamp in forever. Ah, go ahead.
Carles Barrobes: Sorry, sorry. Before we are over, though, I don’t know what. What time. How are we on time?
Tom Ray: I was just wrapping up here, but.
Carles Barrobes: Yeah.
Tom Ray: What do you got to say?
Carles Barrobes: Yeah, no, I wanted to thank you very much for your podcast because it’s been super. Because these months have been, for me, a big learning process of getting to know what’s out there. Because when we started this, I had no idea what was out there. All of the different cool projects and all the people doing software and people thinking, about the same problems and. Or solving parts of the puzzle. And these months have given me the chance to talk to various musicians on faircamp, talk to Brandon, talk to Mirlo, talk to, a bunch of people, and there’s more. And your podcast has a big. Has been a big kind of way, to listen to your interviews with some of these people and. Oh, yeah, okay. I need to talk to these people and figure out what. What they were about. And it’s literally what it’s been for me. Super useful.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
Carles Barrobes: Yes.
Tom Ray: I’m in it for the same reason that you were just saying that you were like.
Carles Barrobes: Exactly. Situation. It’s a public service that you’re doing to the community. So, I’m super thankful for that.
Tom Ray: Well, thanks. I’m happy to be part of it and meet everybody, so. And I want to thank you for talking, with me today.
Carles Barrobes: Add your Fair Camp. It’s cool. To Fairplayer Join Fairplayer
Tom Ray: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Carles Barrobes: What’s holding you back now? I know what’s holding you back. It’s just get, a little time to go through it, but. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.