In response to the transfer of Bandcamp to a new owner and mass layoffs, a developer has already built a simple alternative for musicians.

There’s a really cool open source alternative to Bandcamp that just came out. With some questions raised about Bandcamp’s future, some musicians in the Fediverse are leaning into the new platform as a different approach to selling their music.

Faircamp is just a static site, and doesn’t federate itself, but its adoption within the Fediverse suggests that people are at least thinking about alternative solutions.

  • theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    58·
    1 year ago

    Doesn’t really matter if it is good or bad, at the end of the day I am forced to go where the people I like choose to sell their music. Right now I use band camp because it gives the most money to artists and it is heavily used by my chosen genre but if band camp goes tits up I have to go where they go.

    • wiki_me@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Maybe if someone will offer paid management of this software, people could contact the artist and suggest it as an alternative.

  • Metal Zealot@lemmy.ml
    271·
    1 year ago

    The setting up of servers and understanding the fediverse will prevent most artists from participating in this, I feel…
    I’d love for this to take off though, I’m fucking pissed that Epic ruined Bandcamp.

      • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        So, would you have to have a separate computer for this or is it safe to just hook up to your laptop? I apologize if I’m dumb about this, I haven’t seen what they seem to be describing.

        It’s a site builder, I get it now.

          • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
            5·
            1 year ago

            I appreciate the explanation and your English is great. I get it now, it’s a website builder for your music that can be hosted on an instance, your instance, or a web hosting site like godaddy. I thought that it used your laptop or desktop as a sort of temp instance.

            • TGHOST-V0@lemmy.ml
              6·
              1 year ago

              Thannnnks,

              Yeah you can say this, to be precise you can replace the word “instance” by “server”, who is basically an computer opened on the web.

              Because a website builder for me I would imagine an framework or a thing design to make websites wrote in php like.

              You can speak of an App, even it can be confusing for you, but an app for a server. You can even have it installed, on an server with an static IP but not domain or website along.

              What you said first was even right. you can even do host it with an laptop for your home network and in this case you don’t need an website ^^

        • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          I’d probably suggest having a dedicated machine. You don’t need anything fancy, I’d imagine any old laptop should do.

          It’s essentially software to convert your machine into a basic web server, so if the laptop disconnects now nobody can download your stuff. And I assume you don’t keep your laptop on 24/7

          • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
            3·
            1 year ago

            I don’t trust myself to do any of that, I have to say. I wonder if there could be a musician that is computer savvy as well, that could host an instance for everyone.

            • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.worldEnglish
              8·
              1 year ago

              That’s kind of the crux of a lot of these things. The instructions make it look really simple to install, but if you’ve never done this before then I could understand it being confusing. There was this teeny tiny line in the middle of some pictures that says someone will help you set them up I think.

              More notably, Radio Free Fedi has been incredibly proactive, offering a free service to help Fedi musicians host their own Faircamp sites on RadioFreeFedi’s infrastructure.

              It looks like you just ask them for help and send them some of your songs and they’ll handle the setup.

              https://faircamp.radiofreefedi.net/

              • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
                3·
                1 year ago

                That’s super kind of them:

                . It is quite not painful. We have some funds donated by lovely members of the RFF community specifically for artists who may need help with a solution like this and may be in no position to help with setup or a small monthly contribution toward upkeep. So please reach out!

                They seem great but that font, yikes to read.

              • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                Thanks for the feedback, I added a big quote from Radio Free Fedi to call more attention to that effort.

          • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            So it is saying you would be the personal server and it builds the site for you. Being on the more creative side of computers, I don’t think you understand how confusing that all reads. I appreciate you thinking I’m smarter than I am though, lol.

            • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
              2·
              1 year ago

              Fair point, I should probably clear that up. Static site generators typically work through a process that builds pages for you on the fly, based on what’s in the folder. However, for it to be available on the Internet, you’d still need a server to run the program, so that you can generate those pages.

              • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2·
                1 year ago

                I’ve never hosted my own sites, I’ve always used like a godaddy. TBF, I’ve never known you could.

        • BolexForSoup@kbin.social
          2·
          1 year ago

          If, and this is a big if, it can support an RSS feed that also allows you to provide the requisite info apple et al demand (3000x3000 pixel image, categories, etc.) then it could in theory support it. The bigger concern is traffic - will they be cool with you syndicating out and having folks pulling that frequently and can it support a lot of folks with larger shows doing it. Some podcatchers won’t care and will let you just use an RSS pointing at the page hosting the files, but it’s not a given especially with the larger ones.

          My advice? Unless you want to really hack it together yourself and accept that it could force you to migrate without any notice, sure give it a shot. If you are risk averse, don’t want to disrupt your listeners, aren’t really comfortable doing a lot of tech troubleshooting, etc. I’d say don’t try it. Podcast hosting is trivially inexpensive and all the big services have an embeddable player now if you really want folks to listen on your site.

          Edit: worth noting that a lot of this is going to depend on whether an instance admin specifically wants to deal with all your traffic, assuming you get regular users/the numbers are decently high. If you stand up your own instance then it’s all about what your infrastructure can support.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
      8·
      1 year ago

      You might be interested in Funkwhale instead.
      It’s a more mature piece of software, it does federate and they’ve even put quite a bit of effort into podcasts.

      They have a flagship instance at open.audio, which only allows Creative Commons content (to avoid copyright issues when federating).
      So, as I understand, if your podcast is CC-licensed, they’d be happy to host yours.

      • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Thanks for this, it does seem to be what I’d be more interested in. So please correct me if I’m understanding this wrong. Funkwhale is like lemmy or kbin, in that it’s a way of using the fediverse and open.audio is an instance of funkwhale. Am I getting that right?

        • Knusper@feddit.de
          2·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, everything you said there is correct.

          If you want a somewhat more comprehensive definition:
          Funkwhale, Lemmy, Kbin (as well as Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed etc.) are pieces of software, which can be hosted on a server and which implement a communication protocol for the federation of social media content.

          If someone then takes such a piece of software and actually does host it on their server, then that’s called an instance. Generally, they need to buy a domain name to do so, like “open.audio”, “lemmy.world”, “feddit.de” and so on.

          • PeleSpirit@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            Awesome, we’ll give open.audio a try. Thanks for going slowly on explaining, I think I’m finally catching on.

  • unix_joe@lemmy.sdf.org
    4·
    1 year ago

    Honestly, fuck Bandcamp. I used that platform for years, purchased a huge library, supported artists even when I was about 90% sure that some of them were just resellers providing rips of the original artists music.

    And then for no reason at all a few weeks ago, I was asked to verify my account via email. Despite using the correct autosaved password. That email never arrived. Never arrives no matter what I try. So I cannot get back in. Support is like check your spam folder like motherfucker you don’t think that’s the first place I went when I didn’t see the conformation email?

    Fuck the new ownership. Fuck Bandcamp. Good luck with your upcoming job search.