Last.fm tells me that in the last 2 years I've listened to songs from 2,015 different albums (almost exclusively via Spotify). That goes up to 4,238 in the last 5, and increases by a few hundred per year thereafter.

The top 50 albums over those 2 years are a quarter of my listens, the top 100 are just over a third.

Even if two-thirds of that album count is bad metadata (e.g. the same song counted against multiple different albums/compilations/etc.) it would still be prohibitively expensive to consume anywhere near the same breadth of content if I had to acquire perpetual rights (from Bandcamp/iTunes/etc.) for everything rather than effectively renting them out for a single play (from Spotify).

The other thing I like about the streaming model is that artist remuneration correlates to how impactful their work subsequently is to my life (i.e. how many times I listen to it both during discovery and then over the subsequent years/decades) rather than how effective their marketing is at convincing me to buy the album up front.

> artist remuneration correlates to how impactful their work subsequently is to my life (i.e. how many times I listen to it both during discovery and then over the subsequent years/decades) rather than how effective their marketing is

I may have the wrong end of the stick here, but it sounds like you think all artists get a certain fee per stream, where as the reality is far from that (depending on many factors).

Is there an android app that works well with this? Youtube Music has killed most of the usefulness that Google Play Music had (e.g., no way to edit id3 metadata, no way to browse by genre, and a thousand other tiny papercuts) and I'm really looking to stop using it.

I tried Otter, which touts itself as a mobile app specifically for Funkwhale and found that it had some pretty glaring flaws, namely the way it managed the playing queue. It also had some other issues with volumes in an album.

So I've been trying Ultrasonic, using the subsonic API feature of Funkwhale, and it's working pretty well. Not as slick as Google Play Music ever was, but better than Otter (for now).

They show a screenshot of it running on Android right on the frontpage, so apparently yes. There’s a list of clients over here:

https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/apps

Are there any laws to worry about with this? What's stopping a bunch of people coming together and doing this?

This could be really cool especially for a lot of older music that isn't on streaming platforms.

Sharing with friends via a server is as much copyright infringement, legally speaking, as sharing with randoms on bittorrent. Its just much harder to prove, much less financially beneficial to prosecute and much worse PR if you do it anyway to set an example.

> legally speaking

as usual, this depends on where in the world you are. Some legal systems do make a difference here.

I don't think so because it is not illegal to give them a copy on a cassette

Not illegal where? I'd be surprised if this wasn't copyright infringement in most USA-compatible jurisdictions.

USA?

"Making a noncommercial mix tape (as in, an analog audiocassette) of copyrighted songs is immune from claims of copyright infringement, thanks to the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, 17 U.S.C. § 1008."

Does it mention creating bit perfect mix tape clones and redistributing to unlimited others?

Some info here...

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v07/07HarvJLTech377...

most of my music is not bit perfect though... they are compressed mp3's of decent quality (but if you look at the bits, they probably look nothing like the originals)

I wonder what the feasibility is of doing something like this for movies and tv shows?

I can't recommend Jellyfin enough. It works remarkably well!

https://jellyfin.org

Jellyfin is an amazing and underappreciated project. I've run it for a year or so and it's great.

I use (and recommend) the Kodi addon as the client. I had stability issues with the jellyfin Android (TV) app, but Kodi runs on all sorts of platforms and it's very well supported. I use it for music, too (there's a dedicated music player for it in f-droid called "gelli.")

What's the difference between this and Plex?

Jellyfin is free and open source software for one. I don't know the exact difference in the feature set but I have heard people complaining that Plex is focusing more on surveiling it's users to push ads. I just got Jellyfin working with linuxserver.io docker image on my rpi4 and it is pretty nice.

Adding a random Jellyfin anecdote: Jellyfin stable (10.6.2) is buggy and somewhat unusable for me — videos wouldn't play because of some browser compatibility issue.

This seems to have been fixed in the 10.7.0 RCs, and they've been quite wonderful.

The only feature I find lacking is being able to use Jellyfin on a Chromecast, via their iOS app. It seems to be blocked by the lack of upstream SDK support: https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-expo/issues/16

You have to pay for hardware transcoding with plex. Plex (and also Emby for that matter) have more client apps and platforms supported than Jellyfin though, so you might want to check that before settling for one.

Jellyfin is fully open-source and doesn't require any third party authentication. It's not quite feature complete versus Plex but it is very close, and has never been a issue for me or my users.

I don't do it because I don't want to expose my network, but /r/plex would have more info.

You could always set up a VPN and make the Plex server only available on the VPN's interface. But then you have to be on the VPN on whatever device you want to watch on, so it can be a bit of a hassle if you're not on your own devices.

That's not the way to do it. If anyone can break out of Plex they are on your local network.

Besides, if you're going through all that networking hassle, you're better off doing things right. Get a real firewall like pfSense, then setup a separate network just for outside facing services. To access those services locally create firewall rules that allow traffic 1 way: from your trusted network to your outside facing network. While you're at it, consider making separate networks for IoT devices, and maybe even another for untrusted guest devices. You can use VLANs or physical interfaces if your firewall has enough ports.

Seems like running separate wires for each of those networks would be a huge pain.

Nah, with VLAN tagging you can do it as a single legged router, or as a virtual switch if you’re running it all in a hypervisor.

My home network has 12 VLANs, but each VM cluster node only has 2 NICs

I’m interested that you say the artist gets more royalties. How does that work?

If you're buying 1 - 2 albums per month, at a price of about $10 per album and with artists/composers on average being paid a flat 20% of album sales[0], then you'd be giving an artist $2-4 USD for that album. If that artist is a smaller artist and is releasing their album relatively independently (very common these days), then their percentage earned can be 50% - 80% instead, leading to you paying the artist more like $5-10 USD for those album(s).

For streaming music, let's say you're listening to the artists music in the USA (meaning your streams are worth the most). Let's also assume an average song length of 4 minutes and an average per-stream payment to the artist of $0.003526648542 dollars since you're in the USA[1]. In this world, if you listen to that artist for 3 hours a day, every day, for all 30 days in a month, then you will listen to 1350 songs from that artist and earn them ~$4.76 with all your listening.

So while it is possible that you could listen to an artist so much on a streaming platform that you give them more than if you buy an album, I wouldn't call it super likely.

[0] - https://www.recordingconnection.com/reference-library/record...

[1] - https://www.igroovemusic.com/blog/wie-viel-erhalte-ich-pro-s...

Beautiful calculation. Let's say that if you listen to music for 3 hours a day then it is as if every month you spend 5$ which goes to divide for all the artists you listen to, every month. So you have to listen to an artist 100 hours to compensate for the purchase of an album, it's not something you do with every artist you know.

This does assume you're not decreasing any revenue by using Funkwhale's sharing functionality.

Royalties is probably the wrong word. What i mean is that i can buy an album for $5 on bandcamp and the artist will get more money than if i stream the album 1000 times on spotify. Album sales (especially in no-tour lockdown times) are an important part of funding musicians. Streams dont cover bills. Neither does merch.

You have described precisely the reason I support artists on Bandcamp - my single €5 purchase is worth 1000s of streams. Although I'd argue artists are promoting merch because selling albums/EPs doesn't pay the bills. It's fascinating what merch people will buy too - tapes, signet rings, €30 caps, bags...

> artists are promoting merch because selling albums/EPs doesn't pay the bills. It's fascinating what merch people will buy too - tapes, signet rings, €30 caps, bags...

Pretty much this. The music is basically promotion for the merch, which actually makes money.

Cassette and vinyl sales are also important because in addition to the nostalgic (hissy/scratchy but also warm and saturated) "analog" sound the physical recording is a fun collector's item and something you can show off.

Hopefully live shows will return at some point as well.

What are you using to host the server? VPS? Machine from your home network?

vps(https://contabo.com/) about $5 a month or so. I think Funkwhale can be hosted on a server with the library on amazon s3 if you want a lot of cheap storage. but ive been fine on my vps for now.