Roadmap

We still consider Bandwagon.fm (and the open-source Bandwagon app) to be a “beta test” which means that it’s solid enough to let regular users give it a try, but there’s much more we know we want to do. While no online software is “final”, here are some of the core features we know we’ll want to add in the near future.

We’d love to hear what you think about this, so please reach out to @[email protected] or send an email to [email protected] and let us know how we can do this better.

Music Discovery (first releases 12.2024)

The reason any artist puts their stuff online is so that others can find it. Bandwagon’s beautiful profile pages are meaningless if nobody can find them.

So, we have begun work on this, and are hoping that the first parts of this project are ready by the end of the year.

Audio-Specific Search 🔗

The Fediverse is ready for a new kind of search engine that’s designed for people, not algorithms. Mastodon is forging this path with their new discovery providers proposal, and we’re looking to build a search tool into every Emissary app. This, of course, includes an audio-specific search engine for every Bandwagon instance. Here are the principles we’re looking at right now:

  1. Consent. Inclusion in the search index is exclusively opt-in, with easy tools to start and stop.

  2. Licensing. We’re going to do a better job of highlighting the license(s) that you release your music under.

  3. Curated. Search engines are great, but have you tried human curated lists? We want to ensure that any discovery engine doesn’t lose its human touch.

  4. Distributed. Search indexes should work together across instances so that you get good results whether you’re on a big server or a small one.

  5. Multi-platform Bandwagon isn’t the only game in town, and there’s no reason to limit discovery to Bandwagon sites only. We’re going to figure out how to index any other platform (where we can get consent) and extend music discovery to as much of the Internet as we can.

  6. Follow-able. This one’s important. You should be able to follow search results just like any other actor on the Fediverse. That means you could set up a search on Bandwagon.fm and then see new release announcements in your Mastodon.social account. This is how we deliver discovery and search in a Fediverse-native way.

Partnership with Internet Radio Stations (in progress now)

We’re also trying to collaborate with existing Internet Radio stations to make it easy to publish your music to them. This will be an additional “opt-in” that will help get your music playing online as easily as possible.

We’ll be excited to announce these partnerships as soon as we have them solidified.

Digital Album Sales (starting work 12.2024) 🔗

The other important feedback that we’ve heard loud and clear is that many artists want to sell their music online. That’s the reason they’re putting up with corportate silo sites for now. What will digital sales look like? We’re still working that out, but here’s our thoughts so far:

We’ll add a way for you to post “premium downloads” for every album. This will link to your existing ways of taking payments, whether that’s PayPal, Venmo, Square, or Stripe. We can make integrations with these payment processors that will let you accept payments directly into your bank accounts. Bandwagon won’t touch it, and won’t take any “commissions” or “fees”. When we receive a confirmation from PayPal (or whoever you’re using) we’ll grant that user access to the premium download.

This will take a decent amount of work, both in the way that Emissary handles downloads and in building connections for every payment processor that you all want to use. We are not planning on starting on it until the end of 2024, depending on other circumstances.

Profile Import/Export (starting work 01.2025) 🔗

This is an important feature for Emissary/Bandwagon because it fulfills our guarantee of no “vendor lock-ins” and no “walled gardens”. You should be able to take your profile with you anywhere you want, which prevents bad actors from “trapping” artists on their services.

There are already a few proposals our there for account portability and nomadic identity. In addition, the W3C is working on a standard for profile portability. We’re waiting on this discussion to solidify, and for form of spec (even an early draft) that we can support.

By the way, we have also committed to serving accounts on Bandwagon.fm for free at least until we’re able to support true account portability to anywhere you want, whether it’s your own self-hosted instance, another host, or even another app entirely that supports the emerging open standards.

And More…

There are tons of other issues in the Bandwagon Issue Tracker. Some big, and some small. Feel free to add your own ideas into the mix. Let’s talk about what makes musicians successful, and the online tools they need to get there.