If it “holds them in the same regard”, it means they’ll win and you’ll get the same kind of shit you get elsewhere because precisely, the “unfair” aspect doesn’t happen within the platform, it happens before (through marketting money, through access to huge teams to work and produce more work more often than the competition, through the benefit of having more time due to priviledged background etc.).
If you compare how much money Björk or Thom Yorke made on Bandcamp compared to unkown musicians, you’ll get the same kind of rift than on Spotify because the system is rigged long before the music ends up on the store or on the player.
However it’s true the more unknown artist MIGHT make more money overall on Bandcamp than on Spotify. But Resonate isn’t Bandcamp, it’s a bit like Bandcamp but it shares Spotify’s “flaw” that it rewards on the number of listens (even if it rewards better), which means artist provoking a strong social incentive to listen to their work will get their money back more easily.
Here I think what we’re all trying is to find a playlist reward system that actually DOESN’T treat “unknown musicians” and “hottest music” the same way, and instead makes the sharing of unknown music MORE valuable than the sharing of already well established artists so that we see pop up a lot more playlists with a real desire to help people discover artists under the radar, than playlists as popularity contest.
That’s just privatizing the playlist work and it’s exactly the same as on Spotify. It would just give a few (paid) people all the power and it would just make for a new highly powerful class of gatekeepers, which would then recieve tons of music everyday, wouldn’t be able to sort it out etc. In essence, this would give us exactly what’s already out there. Best case scenario it would give us a sort of Bandcamp Daily editorial practice, which is good but nothing new and not great either.
The idea here again is NOT to incentivize playlist based on traffic, it’s to incentivize discovery of new work. It’s to push people to be bold and go listen more “out there” music and then share it, exactly like you seem to want.
I’ve made it clear in my post earlier above but I’m reiterating : if a song has been shared or already listened (ie. already found its target audience through the artist’s own marketting) above a certain threshold there is nothing to gain for the playlister, if there is nothing to gain we’re not “paying based on traffic”, it’ll just default to the usual playlisting habit, “share whatever, try to be popular, but we won’t finance that because it’s of no use”.
However, if someone makes strictly folk-techno, poetry and atonal classical playlists (I’d be eager to meet that fella by the way), it’s very likely that : 1/ he’d be a go to source for people who like that stuff because it’s a niche thing and not many people curate that kind of stuff 2/ he would probably be playlisting work that hasn’t been widely shared and so he’d benefit from it… UNLESS one of the songs on his playlists for some reason (used in a movie, or whatever else) becomes super famous, then he stops benefiting from it.
What if we say a playlister can only benefit during the first 200 listens (random example) ? Or better yet during the first 100 listeners reached ? (this way a playlister can’t capitalize on people being fans and listening to a song several times). I know of niche ambient musique concrète that could potentially gain a few thousand listeners because they have their audience, and in that aspect of things, it would mean that you don’t gain more to be “The Kind of music concrète” or “The King of Pop Playlists”, actually no : you gain MORE to be “The Kind of music concrète” because you’re pretty sure not a lot of people are sharing those works, and if you’re “the King of Pop playlists” there’s always quite a big chance that everything you’re sharing has already long past its “playlist potential gain” threshold and will litterally make you gain 0 credit anyway.
Do you see the point I’m making? Instead of creating a paid for curator pool who will become a few gatekeeper, trying to create a STRUCTURAL framework so that ALL THE PEOPLE who have a healthy desire for obscure work to be well known are a little compensated for their effort, and ONLY for helping discover unknown work, NOT for having their playlists have a lot of traffic.
