How is everyone listening to music these days?
I use YouTube Music almost exclusively, since I like having YouTube Premium and Music comes for free. But it’s not the best experience.
For indie artists I buy their music on Bandcamp and listen there, but I was thinking if I should download all the files from Bandcamp and upload to YouTube Music, so I can listen to everything in a single place.
I’m a big fan of audio files stored on my device played through VLC. The sad thing is that I almost never listen to new music or music that I’m not working on so I just don’t really have a preference for audio streaming services.
Though I definitely would like to be exploring more now that I’ve got my funkwhale up and running. Seems like a good way to discover some new stuff.
How are you using Funkwhale? Do you have multiple users?
I run a single-user instance as an alternative to Soundcloud (though lacking comments) and Bandcamp (lacking payments). I have two channels, one for work-in-progress songs and experiments (called “backstage”) and another for [releases])https://songs.thefishermenandthepriestess.com/channels/releases).
I think it’s cool that people can follow these channels on Mastodon, and have the new songs show up in their feeds, but the federation is a bit wonky at the moment. I am running an older version, so maybe that’s something that has improved.
I haven’t played much with Funkwhale in a multi-user instance, or with the federation between instances, which is why I’m curious about how you are planning to use Funkwhale to discover to new music.
It’s all kind of confusing still but I’m trying to use it pretty much the same way you are. I want unfinished stuff in one space so that people I’m working with can go check it out and pick something they want to work on (or give feedback). I also want some other unfinished stuff to require an account on the instance so only people in the band can hear it. That’s what I’m struggling with right now so I haven’t really tried using it to explore yet.
For discovering music I thought I’d find a list of instances and dig around, maybe subscribe to a few I like and watch their rss feed or something. A search like intitle:“funkwhale” inurl:“/library/” should give a lot of good results to start with.
I figured there’s all kinds of cool stuff like that to do. Might be the best way to follow playlist curators or artists. I know you can do that from within funkwhale but I would prefer mine to only have the music I’ve made.