Ben Pate

2025-05-06 16:26:05

2025-05: May Update

May 2025: What’s In The Pipeline

Wow, I can’t believe it’s May already. And here I am, still working through my April to-do’s. Fortunately, there’s lots of great Bandwagon news.

New Profiles Released

I’ve just posted a big update to your artist profile pages. This new design builds on the work we’ve done together on the search engine, highlighting albums, concerts, and posts each in their own unique ways. It all combines to streamline your profiles, making them easier to navigate and simpler to manage. Here’s just a hint of the new profile pages:

Check out your bandwagon profile at bandwagon.fm/@me

What’s Next: Online Album Sales

I’m hard at work on this one, and while there’s nothing to DEMO just yet, the basic outline is taking shape. I am aiming for the first versions to be in your hands before the end of May. Here’s how it will work:

To begin, Bandwagon will work with both PayPal and Stripe. You create your own merchant account with one of these two processors, then set it up in your Bandwagon profile. This means that 100% of the payment processing will be done in your own merchant account, and Bandwagon will take 0% of your transaction fees. I’m doing this because:

1. It’s best for Bandwagon as an open source app.
2. It’s best for me because it limits the work and liability that comes with touching your money.
3. I think it’ll be best for you, by putting you firmly in control of your own revenue.

What will this mean for paid plans?

Paid accounts are still on deck for Bandwagon.fm - once album sales and account migration tools are ready. I’m currently looking at a single paid tier at $10/month called “Bandwagon Premier” that will enable online album sales, higher bitrate streaming, and a handful of other features to be announced in the future. I will also give away some Bandwagon Premier accounts on a case by case basis for small artists who need an extra boost. I think this strikes a balance between fair prices and a sustainable ecosystem for everyone.

This is more than just “album sales”

This payment integration will work for both one-time sales (like “buy my album”) and recurring payments (like “join my Patreon”). It all depends on what you want to create for your fans. I’m working on a system that’ll let you grant special access to ANYTHING based on your visitors’ purchases and subscriptions. Want to sell a one-off album? Yes. Want to make a paid newsfeed for “A-List fans? Yup.

How will I connect to Stripe or PayPal?

The details will vary for each merchant processor, but at a high level, you’ll set up your products and subscription plans with Stripe or PayPal, then copy API keys into Bandwagon to link the two together. There will probably be a few more steps than, say, selling stuff on Bandcamp, but I’m working to make this as smooth as possible. The end result will be that you’re firmly in control of your own brand and revenue, without being locked in to any platform - whether it’s Bandwagon.fm, or a payment processor.

What about paying with crypto?

No.

Will it support X payment processor?

At launch, Bandwagon will only support Stripe and PayPal. The goal is to include a select few other processors going forward, depending on what works best for the community. So how do you all currently sell stuff? Let me know. We’ll see if we can plug into them, too. By enabling payments with multiple processors, we can avoid being locked in to bad platforms, and can mitigate their worst monopolistic effects.

Which reminds me, I should probably (finally) write down…

My Decentralization Manifesto

If you’ve been online for 30 seconds or more, you’ve certainly seen some strong opinions about relying on services from big companies. For the most part, they’re justified. Enshitification, surveillance capitalism, and corporate over-reach are all real problems. On the Fediverse, the typical answer is to avoid “centralized” services at all costs. Some voices want to block any kind of search engine because of the potential for abuse. But “distributed everything” is not the only solution available, and it’s probably not even the best choice.

At the end of the day, some things (like moving money online) are hard, and doing it well necessarily means working with big companies. Now, I’m as disappointed as you in the way many big companies are behaving in 2025, but I’m still enough of a capitalist to believe that there are solutions in a free market (a real free market).

Enshittification happens when a company’s customers are so loyal to their brand that management is comfortable squeezing their customers for just a little more. Often times, that loyalty comes from necessity; there’s simply no good alternative to Company XYZ.

The solution is to prevent any one organization from gaining monopoly control over us. By playing competitors against each other (publicly and loudly) each platform knows that their business could evaporate at a moment’s notice if they ever let their customers down. You’d be shocked to learn just how scared the C-suite can get when they think their customers have other places to spend their money.

What does this mean for Bandwagon? Bandwagon will build integrations with private companies (lots of them, actually) but we will never depend on any one specific company. Open APIs are best, but when those are unavailable, we’ll connect directly to Stripe, PayPal, or anyone who can deliver benefits for indie artists. But If I have to integrate with one merchant provider to accept payments, then I’ll integrate with two, or seven, or as many as we can to guarantee that the companies we work with cannot abuse their position with monopoly power.

And what does this mean for Bandwagon.fm? I’m in this game, too… I mean, I just laid out my pricing plans for Bandwagon Premier, and I really want your $10/month. But for this project to be viable, the ecosystem needs other Bandwagon servers to be online. And you need to know that if Ben goes off the rails, you can always run your own server or jump over to an open collective that’s doing the same. Ironically, this lack of lock-in is what builds real confidence in both customers and the organizations that serve them. So, Bandwagon will always be free and independent, and not tied down to anyone. Not even me.

Too big to care - Cory Doctorow - Medium

I’m on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in Boston (Apr 11) with Randall “XKCD” Munroe, Providence (Apr 12) and beyond! Remember the first time you used Google…

^{Cory Doctorow (Medium)}