GnuMusiq/details

Key Elements

• reward audience (users) who take the time to seek out and evaluate new works and new artists
• allow individual users to rate other users by "agreement in taste", making it easier to find works and artists they are the most likely to enjoy
• users can choose to receive notifications of new works, based on artist, topic, other user recommendations, etc.
• crowdsourced streams which can be downloaded in media-player-sized chunks for offline enjoyment
• (new) federated database and storage - to prevent one site from dominating the playing field

under consideration

Some additional features to be considered:

• users can opt to be patrons of given artists (using a model much like Patreon but more flexible)
• ticket sales
• integration with the Virtual Bazaar for merchandise sales

Promotion Mechanism

One of the main problems with large media libraries, whether free (e.g. YouTube) or for-purchase (e.g. Google Play) is finding material that you like. Most sites solve this (to the extent that they even bother) with rather crude algorithms. On Pandora Radio, for example, the user selects a particular artist, and the algorithm finds music that is liked by other users who also like that band. "Liking" is up/down binary, with no gradations or categories.

GnuMusiq would allow users to create categories, and rank music on a scale of -10 to +10 within that category.

Example: I might really like both Led Zeppelin and Enya, but someone else who likes Zeppelin might not want to hear Enya (or vice-versa). Category ranking would allow me to create "heavy metal" and "new age" categories, into which I could highly rate Zeppelin and Enya respectively.

Any artist or track could be rated into as many categories as the user cares to bother with.

Example: any Pink Floyd track would probably rate highly as "classic rock", while only some would rate as "ambient" and others would rate as "heavy metal" or "electronica".

As users build up their personal ratings-libraries, it becomes possible for other users to make use of them:

• If I find a user whose taste I generally agree with, I might use one or more of their categories as the basis of one of my categories, or to build a set-list which could then either be streamed (as in the Pandora Radio model) or downloaded to a device for offline listening
  • Offering zero-cost downloads would generally not be legal with non-libre material; commercially-oriented sites such as Pandora cannot practically provide this feature.
• The system could cross-correlate ratings-libraries of different users, looking for topics with a lot of overlap but some differences, and use this to build a set of "consensus categories" containing many more tracks than any one user would have time or inclination to rate.
  • These consensus categories could then be promoted to new users as a good way of getting started.
• Users could also rate the category-collections of other users, giving some sense of their overall quality (and of the overall quality of each user's curation skills), which could then be used to produce lists of recommendations for other users.

Since this level of rating is a bit more work than simple up-down voting, we will probably want to reward users for making this effort.

This could include store credit (for buying artist merchandise, direct artist patronage, physical media, etc.) and possibly other perks.

The incentive system needs to be carefully designed in order to avoid creating "perverse incentives", but this doesn't seem like a huge obstacle given that we will be getting a lot of feedback from a large number of users, even if that is only a percentage of the total audience. It should be easy enough to spot outliers who, for example, produce an unusually high volume of ratings and yet whose categories do not correlate well with anything and who are not themselves highly rated.

Future Plans

• I hope to resurrect the jukebox and bring it fully into the digital age.
• The software will initially be designed for audio and video, but could later be expanded to allow for other art forms:
  • webcomics
  • writing
  • fiber patterns

Further Reading

• Older versions of the GnuMusiq concept, with more details (only some of which are obsolete) are archived on the Template:Htwiki.
• There are some notes toward the idea of a Patreon alternative. There has been a lot of interest in such a project independent of GnuMusiq.