We can absolutely talk to them but they’ll never work with us, they have absolutely 0 reason to do it, it would only make their business worse, OR it would actually mean that we become their official playlist service and 1/ Bandcamp not having playlists isn’t a bug it’s a feature 2/ If they decided to implement a fully featured playlist system they’d do it themselves within their closed ecosystem 3/ S2O would have to be included in the offer and that effectively means we’d be taking money away from bandcamp and funelling it into our platform instead which they’ll NEVER agree to.
So what are the options left?
The one I see is we could ask them to join the verifiable credentials initiative and issue verifiable credentials when people purchase on Bandcamp so that they can import their bandcamp catalogue right into Resonate and focus on discovery instead of buying again things they’ve already paid for.
Will Bandcamp agree to this?
My guess is no : because it means a lot of work / funds on their side for something that will have absolutely 0 direct benefit to them, they’d effectively be spending money to help us. I like Bandcamp but I don’t think they’re that benevolent, until proven otherwise they’ve spent most of their work creating a closed ecosystem.
Even worse, if we’re to assume Verifiable Credential ensures interoperability of services, it means when someone buys on S2O, they should be allowed to download on Bandcamp right (since it’s a feature they have and we don’t and that’s part of why we want to talk to them), so Bandcamp would be providing a service for us for… Free?
Or are we saying we want to add a Bandcamp cut in Resonate’s finances to ensure a partnership?
I’d love to be proven wrong sincerely, so I’m all ok for trying, but I have a really hard time figuring why they’d do anything to help us out of the kindness of their heart.
As much as I love the idea that my Bandcamp purchases would be interoperable with Resonate, and also, no harm in trying, I’m sceptical and agree with everything you’ve said here.
I mentionned it elsewhere but hours is the metric absolutely, I’ve revised the stats in our S2O updated document (we’re writing it right now actually) based on the average song on spotify being 3min17 and 10€ of credits it gives us something like 4 hours a day for 30 days.
First, don’t ever get your coat we need you!
Second my take is not a lack of desire (I WANT people to be able to import their Bandcamp catalogue on Resonate, I WANT Resonate users to be able to download their tracks on Bandcamp) more a sad prediction : Bandcamp will never help us. We have their API (like everybody does) and that’s I think the extent of the help we can expect from them and that is all.
I’d love to be proven wrong.
Sorry and just to add I’ve read this link
and unless since then we had more infos about a potential collaboration this definitely sounds like wishful thinking to me because it doesn’t answer the only question that matters:
Since the bigger we’d hypothetically grow, the more money we’d take out of Bandcamp’s business and add into our own, what’s the financial incentive on their part to help us that doesn’t make us a direct threat to their business? How do they get a cut of the money used to buy on our S2O platform when the people come to theirs to download? Surely it’s not expected that they’d do it for free?
That’s all I want to know because… That’s probably all Bandcamp would want to know.
So, 3:17 is near enough 3.3 mins, which is near enough 18 tracks per hour.
4 hours per day, based upon the % and weightings in the number of plays spreadsheet, at 18 tracks per hour, comes out ~€20.
I could’ve completely mucked up my quick version of the spreadsheet calculator but there does seem to be a discrepancy between the calculations you mention for the revised s2o document and the spreadsheet @Nick_M posted above.
Again, I might be wrong, but that’d be my sanity checking… something not 100% aligned somewhere?
Yes, which as we’ve seemed to gather with @melis_tailored (and I’ll look for more sturdy data tomorrow) seems to be on the very high end of active users, like… Not that many people listen to 4 hours a day of music.
Edit: and if we consider a “casual user” who listens to maybe 2h a day max but listens to his favorite songs a bit more then with “both” we also reach 11€ so it’s still close to the average streaming monthly sub.
That was also as ‘both’ but this is still a remaining ? then.
So… ‘buy 5 credits for €17 = typically 16 hours of listening’ means 5 / 16 = 0.3125 credits per hour.
Sticking to explorer mode for now…
18 tracks per hour for 4 hours = 72 tracks
72 tracks in the s2o calculator use 0.263 credits which is less than 1 hour of listening if 0.3125 credits per hour.
What is the ‘buy 5 credits for €17 = typically 16 hours of listening’ based upon? Maybe this is the least important bit though and the rest of the math looks good?
With an average song at 3minutes (sorta) that’s minimum 7500 minutes, so that’s about 125 HOURS of discovery? like that’s a huge difference? I fail to see how we could go from that to 17hours.
17 hours is on an average 340 songs. Discovery for 340 songs is 340x0.002 so 0.68 credits?
Spending 5 credits for 17 hours could either mean :
We expect people to only listen to 1/7th of their songs (but it’d take songs to be 7 minutes long for people to have to go past 45 sec to trigger the credit and then stop 15 sec after)
We expect people to listen to all their songs 3 times (then around 4.1 credits become 340 songs x 3 times listened x (.002+.004+.008=.012) so maybe that’s the idea here?)
Have a look at the model… mutual accounting… in a similar way that loyalty points are redeemed be retailers.
And we have a common enemy in Daniel Ek and the 3 majors.
We’re not much of a threat to Bandcamp! But we still have useful brand capital.
Or are Bandcamp too capitalist and unethical for us to deal with? I honestlly don’t know enough about them, but on the face of it I admire their resilience, growth and verall material benefit to artists.
morning all - @LLK@sganesh@Hakanto i’ve been through the text, made a couple of suggested edits.
please check when you can.
going back through this thread from last night - where are we with the huge discrepancy in the explorer costs? one figure was 17 another was 125?
regarding bandcamp - love them but… they have issues.
but the main barrier for us aligning with them is that they are a private company (as far as i’m aware they don’t have a worker union or any shared ownership with staff or artists) who could cash in anytime they choose and leave us with a less palatable partner. this isn’t what we want for our business or the industry as a whole - so it simply makes no sense to get into a bed with an unquantifiable entity.
something like the download capabilities we must build and control ourselves.
we could sacrifice the building of our own back end dashboard for metadata/reporting/payments, but not control of our downloads!
the buy music club is a hack - bandcamp didn’t want to work with them on it.
also has issues of just mates promoting mates = extreme gatekeeping.
something like currents.fm is more interesting - but their biz model is confusing to me - i think @kavan could shed light on that. they call themselves a non-profit but i think that just means they’re not making money right now! they also promote a lot of spotify playlists, which doesn’t make much sense, i’d like them to take ours but will take dev work. i like the commons aspect but they have very limited audience.
The only way I see it is it’s based solely on niche user (where 5€ gets you roughly 13 hours of music? ) even using the spreadsheet that’s what I get so yeah. If @Sam_Martyn and @Nick_M want to shime in I’d be curious to hear how that number was calculated.
Hey @melis_tailored , it is/will be a non-profit, but the current development work for the site is still at its infant stages, and there are other factors on their roadmap which won’t synergise with any DSPs in the future. Am always open to discuss in person!
I’d love to have an open discussion about currents.fm sincerely. From just looking at it it’s not very clear what it is exactly that the platform provides as a service and I’m always very curious about those types of things (Platforms where “the values” are shown to me first and not “what they do”).
It’s something I’ve been fighting against at Resonate (that we don’t show our values first but our product, and that means our product has to align with our values and then people can dig and find our manifesto etc.) and I’d be curious to dig into these questions with someone working on another platform !
See the pricing and products section of this post.
It was based on discount tiers with simple prices in Euros at Stripe checkout.
People who listen a lot and can get a better price for their credits by paying for more of them up front.
That reduces the amount the co-op pays in transaction fees to Stripe and most importantly gives better cash flow
In the calculator, I included the checkout tiers as they seemed an important factor
in reducing the long term listening cost.
We only have one price at the moment. The spreadsheet calculator anticipates the tiered pricing and savings from buying more credits.
If the coop does not intend to implement it, then take those savings calculations out.
The hours of listening is much harder to estimate. I used a historical analysis of 90k plays at an average cost of €0.026 per play and a track duration of 4 minutes on average. That’s 12.8 hours for €5 I think. Not sure if ‘average’ past listening since inception is what you want to use?
The typically x hours of listening statements are very subjective. It depends on the profile of listening and would need to be supported by better maths and a listener pattern segmentation analysis… statistical evidence rather than the pattern hypothesis in the spreadsheet.
Okay, I got a scenario out of the calculator that matches 16hrs for 5 credits,
8 tracks a day as a niche listener uses 0.153 credits a day which adds up to 5 credits after 32 days so is about a month’s listening. So, 8 x 4min tracks a day for a month is ~16hrs total.
I think I’m struggling with a few things here and so it’s hard to communicate as it all gets balled up together. I’m listing these to express the confusion, there’s no need for specific responses to any of these from anyone (unless you really want of course):
I tried to break the spreadsheet and largely failed so the math seems sound to me (and I’m no mathematician so take that as you will) and thanks for putting it together.
I’m personally not convinced tracks per day is as useful a communication metric as hours per day. I think this sentiment was shared by at least @LLK if not others so needs some thinking.
We need metrics that are ethically sound - which is what we’re doing so great - (i.e., we don’t need to be 100% correct as things change, listening patterns develop, we learn more but… we’re trying to do this well and not mislead) like now, as part of the communications strategy for funding etc. and so: do we need to decide between tracks vs hours (or both, or a hybrid or something else) now or later?
It’s all confusing though. I know we’re trying to streamline this for listeners and make it less confusing but even this example makes it confusing for me. There’s a metric of 16hrs listening for 5 credits which seems to apply, using the calculator to niche listening. Yet the metric doesn’t communicate that. But if it maybe we’d need 3 examples for the different listener profiles, but then that’d be even more confusing, etc. etc. It’s good this in all included in the calculator but, and again, this is just a personal feeling, it might be better for us to slim it down further and only focus on the tracks/hours for now.
Credits is confusing anyway (see LLK’s proposal on this).
If there’s a discussion to be had on credits vs £$€ when do we do this lest that gets in the way of the communication we do now.
Tiered pricing sounds interesting but my take would be if it’s not ratified, leave it out for now (no harm in us having the calculations available now, I just mean in the sense that if this is a potential spec for an online calculator it shouldn’t make it to the website yet).
My questions to the community then are:
How soon do we need this? Do we have time to bat it back and forth? Is there something it’s for that is more pressing?
Has calculating based upon the number of tracks listened per day been decided at a meeting already? If this was what came out of discussions as what was needed then I don’t want this discussion to be a distraction from getting it out in the world and we can come back to my niggles when there’s more time.
Otherwise, is it worth collectively making a quick decision (poll) as to what metric we want to use for listener profiles calculations (e.g. hours vs tracks)?
Has there been any decision on tiered pricing? Does it also need making into a proposal?
