Bandwagon is Emissary’s Bandcamp Alternative
A new Fediverse music platform is my kind of jam.
The Fediverse has a bustling music scene with thousands of artists putting out their original work for everyone else to enjoy. We’ve written in the past about Radio Free Fedi and FairCamp, two amazing initiatives to help this community at a grassroots level. They go a long way towards providing a social good for the communities that are already here.
However, the network has largely lacked a dedicated, federated platform for musicians to tap into their community. Sure, Funkwhale exists, but it’s more focused on file-sharing than it is on community-building. What people need is for the ability to announce upcoming releases, promote show dates, and have opportunities to connect with other artists.
That’s part of why BandWagon is so exciting. It’s specifically designed for musicians to not only put their music out there, but stay engaged with their fans and supporters.
A Space for Your Band
Visually, BandWagon strongly resembles BandCamp and the Myspace Music pages of yore. It offers a landing page with a few different tabs, and some simple customization options for color and layout. From here, musicians can list their tracks, albums, and news updates, all while linking to other places on the Web.
The album / track view is relatively simple in appearance, but it gives people full control of each piece of music they upload. This includes the ability to add metadata and lyrics for each track, as well as link to online store pages for purchase.
Another nice feature of Bandwagon is how it puts music discovery front and center. The Discover and Artists page will reveal bands and music releases that it knows about, and will randomize the order on every page load.
Also a happy development is the presence of an Events feature, which allows musicians to share information about upcoming shows, live streams, and release dates. It would be really cool to see this become compatible with other federated events platforms, so that Fediverse could easily subscribe to shows and performances by their favorite musicians.
Integrating with the Fediverse
Of course, all of these features are fine and dandy on their own, but readers might be curious to learn about how this works with the wider Fediverse. Bandwagon is built specifically to sit atop Emissary, and inherits all of its capabilities.
Generally speaking, federation works as expected. Copying a link to an album, profile, or news update reflected a matching activity on Akkoma, but individual songs don’t show up as of yet. Some things also didn’t work properly when testing against Mastodon, but that might be related to actor-specific issues rather than anything else.
Social Sharing
One problem that Bandwagon seems to tackle well is Social Sharing. In a federated system, users often have to fight against a UX that requires them to copy and paste things from one window to the next. Bandwagon anticipates this, and tries to reduce friction by making it easy for people to post directly to their Fediverse timelines. All a person has to do is point to their existing account, and the share, like, and follow buttons work automatically.
While I would love to see this idea taken further, in that federated actions could be performed rather than just cross-posting, I still think this is really useful. It demonstrates the idea that you don’t have to be a Bandwagon member to enjoy what it has to offer.
The Inbox
The most curious part of Bandwagon actually involves the core Emissary experience. This is the area that I think needs a lot of UX love. Emissary is designed to be a highly-configurable, flexible platform, but it kind of gives you the kitchen sink up front.
The Inbox tab is the closest thing Emissary has to a timeline feed. It’s basically a super flexible interface that you can theoretically customize to your heart’s content, provided that you know how to do it. 
Clicking on a post will expand the view in a lightbox pop-up, with a conversation thread and interaction buttons. 
Connection management is very reminiscent of Diaspora or Friendica, where individual contacts can be organized into contact groups with dedicated feeds. 
This page pops up any time you want to either make a connection request, or edit contact details. 
Following has to be done from the top of the Inbox feed. Just plop a URL or Webfinger handle, and you’re good to go! 
Connecting to an artist I found from the Discovery Tab. 
Verifying the new connection.
Emissary’s core experience is a little bit all-over-the-place at the moment. There’s a lot of lightboxes, placement of interaction buttons could use more unification, and the design conventions aren’t self-explanatory yet. Still, the platform shows an enormous amount of potential, and can provide most of what a musician is looking for. The project’s flagship is currently in closed beta, but will likely open up to the general public sometime soon.
Conclusion
It’s still early days for both Emissary and Bandwagon. I have a lot of admiration for the project, and think the Fediverse is long overdue on a quality music-sharing platform that can act as part of the existing network. With some love and care, I could see Bandwagon get polished to a shine. It’s a brilliant way to demonstrate the capabilities of the underlying platform, while offering something that I think a lot of people in the space desperately want right now.
@news the posted link isn't working for me on mobile, so here's a different one!
https://bandwagon.fm/
Seems like a nice federated companion to Bandcamp more than an alternative.
Bandcamp allows artists to stream and sell their physical/digital media or pay-what-you-want while giving artist’s 85 – 90%. I think this part of it is where it is currently not possible find a better deal, because the percentage is excellent. Might change down the line, but it is solid.