Faircamp is a Free Bandcamp Various
Within the aftermath of Epic selling Bandcamp to Songtradr, Bandcamp has discovered itself in a spot of instability. Half of the company’s employees were laid off post-acquisition, main many to invest over the beloved platform’s future. Most significantly, many artists who trusted the service are left on the lookout for options.
There isn’t a Fediverse answer but. Though Funkwhale is a superb music platform, it’s simply not geared in the direction of promoting music. Not all is misplaced, nonetheless, because the Faircamp venture is stepping in to assist musicians.
What’s Faircamp, Precisely?
Faircamp payments itself as “a static web site generator for audio producers”, however a better technique to perceive it’s this: it’s a easy web site which you can host your self. Set up some software program in your server, level it on the folder of the music you wish to promote, and your web site’s pages will construct themselves. You will discover an incredible information for getting began here.
Faircamp gives a excessive diploma of customization, all whereas wanting good doing it. Artists are in a position to arrange fee for albums and tracks, provide freebies, unlock codes, and embed a participant in different websites. It seems nice on cell, too.
To date, the music neighborhood has responded to Faircamp very positively. Many musicians inside the Fediverse have actively made an effort to type an old-school webring, within the hopes of supporting each other.
Extra notably, Radio Free Fedi has been extremely proactive, offering a free service to assist Fedi musicians host their very own Faircamp websites on RadioFreeFedi’s infrastructure.
With the current sale of Bandcamp to predatory VC extractive vultures, and the primary transfer to finalise that sale was to fireplace all of the just lately unionised workers, the writing is on the wall for the final least worst choice…
…right here is an choice for members of our neighborhood who could not need or be capable to self-host their music and/or would love one thing that may be a easy, tidy, open and never walled backyard or metrics pushed residence to supply their music to supporters.
Embeds nonetheless look slightly janky on cell, however they might in all probability get cleaned up by submitting a easy pull request on the project’s Codeberg repository.
All in all, Faircamp seems prefer it’s shaping as much as be an incredible various methodology for supporting Fediverse musicians! Hopefully this effort brings renewed curiosity in the direction of constructing federated instruments for creatives on the community, someplace down the street.