Getting more listeners is a major step as everyone mentioned. Part of it I think, is having easy touch pionts into the space without actually having to join the space, if that makes sense. Take Wavlake or amplifiedtunes.online. You can send simple urls or webpages for people to check out and see and listen to things going on in the space without actually needing to join nostr or download another app. I think as soon as you ask people to download an app to access a realm they know nothing about, you have already lost half the people. Then telling them about cryptographic key pairs and lightning wallets looses the other half.
ALSO…we need to bring discussion of V4V music onto legacy platforms. Having people who have already joined talk about it on nostr doesn’t reach anyone. If we had a small but passionate team of people start to create V4V Facebook groups, and whatever the equivalent is on other platforms, they could slowly build a following on these platforms, make people aware and interested enough that maybe after several touch points or having it simmer in the back of their brain for a few months, decide to join.
That’s more the listener side. On the artist side, I think something needs to be done to make it more financially incentivized. Tell musicians to join and hope that a small number of people zap them from the goodness of their hearts is a tough selling feature. Maybe it’s sacrilege to say this around here, but what if the Spotify model would be good but just by cutting out Spotify as the middle man. What if a protocol could be developed that would allow artists to create a sort of subscription model that would open up their full catalogue to people who subscribe and pay say 1000 sats a month? Kinda like auto boosts and subscriptions joined together but subscribing to the specific artist and not a whole platform. Artist could have like a couple sample songs available for free to anyone, and people that want to check out more can subscribe to the artist and unlock their whole catalogue. And of course send zaps like always if they want to. I know lots of people think completely open and free is best because it goes with the open source protocol ethos, but if most people can freeload without having to give up anything, they will. So some sort of middle ground between free and open and a “subscription or paywall” may offer the best of both worlds for artists and listeners alike?
