Hello! I was looking for alternatives for Spotify to listen to music and create and share playlists with friends, and found a huge amount of players, both local and streaming, but none of them offered a reliable way to share playlists with friends. So here me out: what if there were a federated, self hostable platform where you can create an account, that provides an API that all the million music app can integrate easily in order to synchronize and share them also with people that uses other apps? Do you think it would work? I believe that if something like this would widespread, huge music companies like Spotify and Youtube wouldn’t implement such a thing, but that perhaps would be also a way to “disincentivize” people from using those services!
“Hi friends Me on musicapp1 and Fred on musicapp2 created this cool playlist, hear it out!!”
“Sorry I pay 12$/month for Spotify, I cannot see it”
A federated platform seems to be a big overkill for this use case. Sorry, but that sounds a bit like the time where everyone tried to solve everything with blockchains. You could simply export and import playlist with a file that can be shared. Companys simply don’t want it to be that easy to switch to other services because its a huge selling point that you got all your playlists in their system. Additionally I don’t think that it would be that easy to identify songs between systems because I don’t think that there is a unique identifier like the ISBN for books.
This is something that has to be done manually. What I have in mind is a platform where I can have a playlist on my music player app, that I update everyday I discover new music, and I want to be able to send a link to you so that you can listen to my playlist in real time, without having to export and then import manually. Also, I would like to be able to have “cooperative playlists” like Spotify has: everyone I give access to my playlist can add songs to it (I do this with my friends, we use it to discover new music)
I said federated because otherwise it would only work between close friends that can create an account on my server, and it means that I wouldn’t be able to share it with anyone outside my friend group. Otherwise it has to be a centralized service I guess