S20 Proposition for buying full albums

Continuing a reflexion I just had in another topic regarding artists capacities to control some aspects of pricing, and fairness to Resonate listeners regarding the price of full length albums, I wanted to make a proposition.

As an Artist, I want to have the option for each full length / EP release to say “if someone spent x amount of cumulated money listening to my tracks they own the entire album/EP” this way I can control the price of my album in Stream 2 Own format independantly from track count.

Example :

My album has 12 tracks, I want it to be 10€ to own the full album.

If someone has listened to 10 tracks 9 times reaching a 10€ spending on this release that person now owns the 12 tracks of the album.

Prices can be fixed freely between 0 and evidently the maximum being 1€/song.

19 Likes

I’ve also been thinking about this.
My music is both on here and on Bandcamp.
I have a 6 track album available for £4 on there. It’s got a couple of tracks that are kind of fillers. They work in the context of the album but you might not want pay an extra £1 for them.
If I could offer it on Resonate for £3 stream to own or download, I do that happily.

I think there is same issue for people with 30 track albums of short 1min tracks etc.

4 Likes

I can see this taking the shape of a credit-spend progress bar on the album pages, could be pretty neat.

3 Likes

Yep, ditto, I’d been having similar thoughts, around a kind of artist selected pricing cap.

I especially like how this might look in the context of buying an album/ep/etc outright.

If the ‘buy now’ button was also on the album menu it could be a ‘bandcamp-like’ experience. Not that bandcamp-like is the ultimate aim but there is a parity, discussed elsewhere, in what the ‘own’ part of stream2own means - like can I download audio files?

The only other thing though. I’m not sure that between 0 and €1 per track works completely.

The cost of streaming/serving audio that that coop incurs means sensible minimum price caps might need setting?

I’m loathed to take choice away from artists but at the same time, there is a balance in this ecosystem that probably requires it. I think I’d be cool with that if I understood why and hopefully other artists would too.

Perhaps rather than a hard minimum, if an artist sets it too low, the platform asks “are you sure?” and explains why €x would help support the ongoing sustainability of the service? The choice is still the artist’s but at least it’s in dialogue with the coop’s needs too.

edit: just thought, in the 36-track example I’ve mentioned in other threads, perhaps this same ‘suggestion’ process could inform an artist, at upload, that the automatic s2o checkout pricing for this release is €x if it’s above another certain threshold. In practice, it’d say like ‘hey, just so you know, this will end up costing someone €36 to own. If you’re cool with that, fine, otherwise you can set a price cap over here>>>’

3 Likes

Completely agree with that. Incidentally Bandcamp has some discrete but nevertheless very easy to spot “price references” indicated when you have to set the price of your release, telling you thresholds known either to be deterrent or uselessly low, and then it’s your decision to fix the price to whatever.

We should aime for that level of fluidity and help the uploaders/artists know where they are and what happens at all time in a non invasive way.

I think it’s awful if we can’t allow people to publish their tracks here for free.

My personnal opinion is all music should be free always, it’s because we live in the capitalist dystopia that we’re forced to sell it, but whenever someone can in fact do it because they feel strongly about it or have the means to, we should let them.

I asked for my music to be free here, I hardly see it as that detrimental to the platform, as long as they allow for a pay what want options which we 100% absolutely need (it’s a critical feature actually in my opinion, people should always be one click away from donating however much they want to an artist).

6 Likes

Yep, I’m cool with that. Back in the upload yourself days I put everything up free for similar reasons (I wonder if it still is).

I’ve got experiences within my own music community where I’m questioning the impact on sustainability that overly cheap gig door prices and music prices may have, but a) that’s me, and b) super-specific.

I think ultimately you’re right though, I can’t imagine free music would be a majority position or that it’d cripple the coop.

2 Likes

Would really love to see this. Being able to set a max price per album seems necessary with the stream2own structure as it is currently. Although in general, artists have the freedom to release singles or EP, some projects like soundtracks tend to have much longer tracklists. With the option to buy the album outright, I wonder too if the amount that was already spent listening to the track could be deducted from the price.

4 Likes

Thanks @LLK for pointing to me this discussion.

So I hop in just to say that to me (a listener, not artist), the proposition of a pre-determined album price which lets you own the entire album once you have spent this price listening to the album tracks totally answers my needs.

It seems like a “simple” (sorry devs, I know we find everything simple to develop :wink: ) way for an artist to limit, if he wants to, the cost for listeners to get his full album, and therefore for listeners to eventually not pay the same price for two albums which do not have the same duration (which will always feel strange even though maybe it took the same amount of work for both album…).

2 Likes

I’m late to the party but it looks like a lot of the forum parties stopped about a month ago… I hope the forums pick up a bit because I’m reading about things that sound awesome but I don’t know if there’s any action being taken on them.

I really like the idea of the artist being able to set the price of the album, be it free or more, and the option to buy the album being up front on the artists page. I’m using Resonate for the first time right now and as I’m listening to this album I can’t see how to just buy the album if I want it. It looks like buying a song is easy but I’m an album fan personally, and from there I’ll select songs to make playlists now and then. Course as I learn the website better it might make more sense, but right now that’s my first thought, how do either buy it right now or save it for later? Saving/favouriting a song seems easy but not the album.

I also like the idea of the album being considered ‘bought’ once that number of plays/pays is reached be it through full album plays or the same few tracks listened to repeatedly. If someone is digging your stuff enough to listen to the same few tracks over and over, and the album is set at $10 and they reach that number through just 3 tracks, I think it’s fair to give them the rest.

3 Likes

Yeah, I think the reason there’s been a clear drop in participation since a month or so is basically due to most efforts being directed towards funding campain at open collective Resonate Co-op - Open Collective and some decent amount of support to make sure the coop can progress with its goals.

So yeah there’s been some slowing down, but devs are definitely working on improving the platform, they’ve built an app, @psi is working on a desktop app etc. I think it’s just the global “community” implication that has slowed down a bit because the team working on the code is small and can’t handle all the input and ideas all at once so a lot of us see it as better praxis to leave them be for a little while.

Awesome, thanks for the clarity. I feel like there it would be really helpful to have a pinned post somewhere that people could see that links them to the open collective site. I stumbled onto Resonate through the .is site, and it’s a little confusing to navigate what’s actually happening that’s all. I’ll be donating for sure, I really want ethical streaming to be part of the future.

Just a quick question, I keep seeing coop written down. What is that? People say like resonate coop and things like that. Is it written because it’s a co-op? I kept thinking like chicken coop haha.

Yes, Resonate is a cooperative company run by its members, you can become a listener member to further support the co-op. There’s more info there :

But we could definitely do better work explaining what that means to people unfamiliar with the concept of cooperative run businesses.

1 Like

Bumping this topic because it is one of the most popular proposals (16 likes)

4 Likes