Music is not a market. Culture is not a market. Music is a commons, that have accompanied humans since the beginning of our journey on this planet, inspired by the birds, insects, the winds in the trees and across valleys, the flows of water down to mountains to the ocean, the flows and rhythms beating within us, in our bodies and hearts and minds.
Music grows into us all through our hearts.
It's time to reclaim music from the industry.It's time for musicians we love to receive they fair share of the deal, directly from us who listen, without greedy intermediaries.
When I click on the link in the original post it leads to a 404 on mastodon for me, so I'm not sure what the context is, but would be happy to chat, you can e-mail mirlo folks at hi@mirlo.space.
fwiw we applied to the nlnet grant for decentralization with the idea that we'd integrate taler into the platform, but that grant decision has been slow. it's on our horizon!
If you are going to integrate Taler, maybe you should post there, hehe. I think that Taler payments would be of great use for musicians and labels especially as it enables micropayments for selling tracks and it would be most useful that the discussion happens both here and there, since we can federate a category for this, and most free software projects for musical talent are on the.socialmusic.network where they can work altogether in figuring out the critical path to integrate among themselves.
I would also suggest talking to @benpate who recently added payments to BandWagon.fm via a Stripe plug-in, but is keen to use a vendor-neutral payment protocol. Also Matt of Write.as/ WriteFreely, who has experimented with supporting Web Monetization for payments.
Hey, thanks for the shout out, @strypey. Mirlo is definitely the leader right now in selling albums online. But I’m doing my best to make sure they don’t rest on their laurels too long
I have looked at Taler a couple of times and just reread the website today. But I still have a hard time understanding the plan for rolling out something like this.
Here’s an example scenario:
Let’s say I’m a kid who wants to buy an album from my favorite band “The Sneezing Dweebs.” I’ve got Dad’s ATM card and he says I can spend up to $20 as a reward for getting all B’s this semester.
How to I get my $20 into the system? (for kudos, or coins, or whatever this currency is called)
And does the website owner who offers sales via Taler now have to operate a “bank”?
Does the website owner now have to manage wire transfers as payouts to “The Sneezing Dweebs” when their album sells?
And at the end of the day, how is this workflow “Credit Card → Gateway → Coins → Gateway → Bank Account” any more efficient than this one? “Credit Card → Gateway → Bank Account”
The only way this makes sense to me is if people earn and spend several times coins before transferring them back into dollars, but I have no way of gauging how common this will be. My guess is that most musicians will drain their “coin” account into regular currency as soon as possible, to pay for new snare drums, guitar pedals, and tacos.
As a developer / site admin, I’m working really hard to avoid the responsibility (and liability) for processing real transactions on my servers. I might be interested in building this into my work if there were third parties (like Stripe) that could efficiently transfer money into and out of this system for me, so that I would only need to send transactions to the gateway and the rest of the FinTech was handled for me.
I’m really want to integrate new payment methods, but I need help understanding the value prop for Taler. The GNU website is rich on technical details, but doesn’t explain enough about how non-techies will actually use this.
It’s been a while since I looked at Taler, but my understanding is that the fundamental design goal is to replace the credit card network. So the workflow is more like;
In Aotearoa we’d probably call this a digital version of EFTPOS. Which is what we call the debit card system with cards issued by banks and merchants using leased payment machines.
Thank you. This is very helpful. Pulling funds directly from a bank account should lower costs significantly. We have this in the US, but use it less because there are more fraud protections on our credit cards than our bank account numbers.
I’m still curious about the technical overhead (and liability) that’s placed on website admins to be “a bank” that holds currency on behalf of our users. This seems like the big hurdle I’ll need to overcome before jumping on board.
