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”
It could work as a music sales service too though. Have software that matches the tracks in the playlist to tracks in your library, maybe with a confirmation / manual match dialogue, and a link to the equivalent of iTunes to buy any missing tracks.
Give the option to buy albums too, so if someone sends you a playlist with a new Billie Eyelash single, for example, it could also recommend the album it’s from.
For those of us with large libraries, we just match the songs, but it’s got the potential to make money for the artists too. I believe that Discogs and MusicPicard? can match tracks to albums, and link to artists stores, so at least part of the sales side exists already :)