Spotify is pure youāll own nothing and youāll be happy vibes.
Discussion
Artists literally cannot do anything.
To simply change an album cover, first you have to submit a request with your publisher. If you're on good terms they'll get to it in a reasonable amount of time and reach out to Spotify. They'll review it if its actually acceptable and decide if you'll be censored. At some point a month or so down the line, the album cover will change, you might get an email.
Imagine if there was an alternative network where you can just permissionlessly click upload cover art, hit save, and be done with it.
One of the reasons I build itdv.podtards.com is that nostr:npub14c7ksq2wln0s9nftjlr0wv2vqpg5xzvw7jezl3whczc0ff2y97eqerl5l2 wanted an easy way to share their music with friends and family since podcast apps lack when it comes to music so I build a simple music app for them.
TJ didn't want to give their catalog to Spotify and nostr:npub1yvscx9vrmpcmwcmydrm8lauqdpngum4ne8xmkgc2d4rcaxrx7tkswdwzdu said bro I got you.
TJ is in complete control and even running his own node that all the sats go to.
Spencer and I helped him set this all up over the past years and the node is even funded with channels from the community. He only had to get a mini PC for the hardware for the node.
One big community helping each other out all V4V style and for the love of the game.
My band took our music of that platform a couple of years back after I had a very frustrating experience with the distribution saying our music had been flagged for copyright, despite not being sample based. Most likely caused by us using the same instrument plugin setting that a bigger artist had used somewhere, at least thatās the best correlation I could think of. It certainly wasnāt the only reason for pulling our music but it was the last straw as far as I was concerned. These platforms will make artists jump through all kinds of hoops to ultimately be a cheap advertising agency for the platform itself. Fuck them.
The irony being that even though our reach shrank massively, we made more money focusing through Bandcampā¦ and now thatās enshittifying so the next logical step is to release on infrastructure we can control.
Itās a harder road for sure but at least Iām not some hoe saying āplease add us on Spotify, Daniel Elk wants more war techā.
That said, I still havenāt worked out how to do splits with keysend but Iāll get there.
What are you making the feed with?
You can also just use a lightning address now since the apps have been updated now to handle them except Podverse.
We tested lnaddress the other day for The Trusted and it works. We even had a mix of keysend AND lnaddress within the same set of splits.
Ah man I hope I can do that in Castopod. My aim is to start onboarding irl musician friends but I need to get a proper understanding of things before hand, otherwise Iām just causing confusion and helping no one.
Castopod, Albyhub created the snippet of code I needed to add to the RSS and alls well with that but given the format, I donāt understand how to add a contributor as the code generated also ties back to my node. Unfortunately thereās nothing at all in the Castopod docs covering PC2 features, only that theyāre enabled.
I need to have a read up but Iāve yet to find an easy to understand source, Iāve looked through the podcastindex resources and some of the Bluburry guides but most of the information goes above my current skill level. Iām sure Iām able to do it, just not there yet!
nostr:nprofile1qqs00y32ptdnlfxa5hhv4f30dalwv9vl0a27pqpkdpkx3cyrstp50zqpg3mhxue69uhnwumjwgmkx6revvm8vmrg0fcxxvngdsmxc7t4denhvmr4da585undwsmnv6mzwv6xkmtev358y7r0v94kkcn3w4skgtnvda3kzmqpzemhxue69uhkx6rpv3nzumn0wd68yvfwvdhk6qghwaehxw309anxjmr5v4ezumn0wd68ytnhd9hx27prlx2 who runs castapod or knows it well enough to help out nostr:nprofile1qqsqgcez8t0n3hu6y2nlkpuenf3clh2zmpph2ulqhuvug0sp8v2dvucpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduq3vamnwvaz7tmjv4kxz7fwdehhxarj9e3xzmnyqyw8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytfsxyh8jcttd95x7mnwv5hxxmmdnqzutr ?
Iāve been using this as reference:
https://podcasting2.org/docs/podcast-namespace/tags/value-recipient
And then once Iāve made that bit, in Castopod as nostr:npub1f49twdlzlw667r74jz6t06xxlemd8gp2j7g77l76easpl8jsltvqvlzpez has said, thereās a box to copy and paste it into either in āedit podcastā if you want it to apply to every episode, or āedit episodeā if it changes each episode. Itās called āadditional RSS tagsā.
Currently, you value block looks like this:
Say your manager, George, in his endless generosity suggests you add a split for nostr:nprofile1qqszxk6n5yqh67ak2mqjtrd4fgxf2clyenvvafntv5r9n4knmu5ezfcpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezumt0d5hsz9thwden5te0wfjkccte9ejxzmt4wvhxjme0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tc95f6pm and me. 3% each, because of course Merlin and nostr:nprofile1qqs0s64jxjwyxvwq4dzh9rpt808yg4d3v9sez05ywfhul7s4cuef3ksprdmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujucnpwdehq6tnw3hkctn0wfnj7qgwwaehxw309ahx7uewd3hkctcpr9mhxue69uhhwmm59e3xzumnwp5hxar0dshx7un89ukr3j0m deserve treats too. Then it would look like this:
Pay attention to the differences in
Looking at that on my phone it looks correct but you won't know until you updated the feed and push it to production.
When/if you do just let us know and we can send some Boosts. You have one so adding others isn't much different.
Iāll give that a try once I figure out what the hell is going wrong with Nextcloud now, thanks!!
I know nostr:npub1f49twdlzlw667r74jz6t06xxlemd8gp2j7g77l76easpl8jsltvqvlzpez had issues adding some stuff with castopod which is sad because they've been here since the beginning.
A few of us tried it early on but it's was ready so we moved on.
Yeah I remember him saying he had problems and is now totally DIY, Iām a long way off that skills wise, mostly the new language I think, still donāt understand many of the terms used.
Has anyone youāre aware of done a super basic beginners guide to RSS? Iām going to search myself but asking in case you know of something good I might not find.
Have you looked at sovereignfeeds.com ? You can upload the audio/image files to your server and then use that tool to generate an xml file (podcast feed) with links to those audio/image filles it's very handy. You then upload that xml file to your server and enter the url to it in the indexes.
Try it out, download the xml file and inspect it, test in feed validators, it's a great way to learn!
This is how I feel learn Nostr terms so you're not alone.
This is a good start.
https://fountain.fm/episode/oX38uDpRJy8nPQCOxJPn
This also goes over musicsideproject.com and shows where the stuff is in the feeds.
This is also why I tell people using a host is also fine.
We have found that podhome.fm has all the features we need so far and is pretty easy to understand. It also helps that the community has a direct line to the owner for support.
To be more clear on terminology, I should have prob said...
They SUPPORT all the TAGS we want to utilize in OUR FEEDS.
And if you are kissing any tags, let us know, and we can support them. We are very flexible
I also need to kiss the tags? May explain why Iāve been strugglingā¦ š
Oh man. Autocorrect š āmissingā any tags
Yeah so castapod gives you the ability to add "custom rss." Not sure if that's called exactly that. But you can paste in a xml snippet.
You can do this at the podcast level or the episode level.
So you can start by finding a valid RSS feed, copy their
For this, it worked.
This is why we just use sovereignfeeds.com to make feeds and host them wherever.
You could probably build a dummy feed here and just copy the value block info.
He has one address in there already and splits are just multiple but with a % for the split.
Ahhh yes, I use Podping on there, funny I did play with it more when I was using PeerTube but there seemed to be no way to add the RSS code to PeerTubeā¦
SF is the standard and a nice balance between a host and just copy/pasting pieces from other peoples feeds.
I haven't used it because I only need simple test feeds so it was easier to just do it from the DeMu template at the time.
nostr:nprofile1qqsqgcez8t0n3hu6y2nlkpuenf3clh2zmpph2ulqhuvug0sp8v2dvucpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduhsz9mhwden5te0wfjkccte9ehx7um5wghxyctwvshsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj95crztnev94kj6r0dehx2tnrdakj7khlssy have you see the DeMu feed template with comments on each of the tags? Not sure if it'll help but like nostr:nprofile1qqsgufllkhymhrxaqyc6meh05jw4d4qpk4pym87lnf37qax4y7c8zhqpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0hef8r6 said, there's a bunch of us here willing to help! š And value splits are huge part of what makes DeMu so incredible.
Here's the template nostr:nprofile1qqszxgvrzkpasudhvdjx3anl77qxse5wd6eunndmyv9x63uwnpn09mgpr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0qyghwumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2tcpzfmhxue69uhkummnw3e82efwvdhk6tcgt4a3x put together after he and nostr:nprofile1qqswx5p2r336ltnfzag7j97dz2acwxq5d3yyhw3gsgm7se9x6f86v0spr4mhxue69uhkummnw3ezucnfw33k76twv4ezuum0vd5kzmp0lusn4r recorded Stay Awhile:
https://github.com/de-mu/demu-feed-template/blob/master/feed-with-comments.xml
I used this to hand make this feed.
Was it easy? No
Did I learn a lot about RSS feeds? Yes
One step at a time, you're on the right path. Reach out if you're stuck on anything specific - lots of here willing to help!
And as shitty as this is, it's unfortunatly not a unique story. I've heard similar things happen all the time, its no different than people getting deplatformed on social media... you're just a commodity at best and its cheaper for them to stick their fist up your ass than actually try to help.
Normies dont understand... you do not just simply upload music direct to spotify.
Thanks! This might actually be something I find LLMs useful for (I havenāt really to date), I just asked about creating examples of code needed for RSS feeds and they look right, I have some time tomorrow to play around. Good to know thereās people here whoāve been around this scene a while.
That quote would be great if it was by Buddha š