The world's income per capita is around $10000 a year. In South Europe is 25k€/year. In Northern Europe, 55k€/year. In the United States, $80k/year.
120 dollars per year is 0.5 percent of the income of the average citizen living in the (relatively) poorer part of developed world. That means that are plenty of people who can afford it, and it's not just the top of the top.
(just a placeholder for my usual rant about how federation is the wrong unit for scaling social media)
Longer than that. The GNU project started in 1983. Linux first release is from 1991.
And they would be nowhere if it was not for IBM, Sun and Google pouring billions into it.
Let's stop with the slacktivism and start putting money on the table, and professionals of all specialties will show up and change this reality.
I'd argue that if you can't afford to pay for a $10/month service and if you are so unproven that no one would be willing to back this up for you, "looking for ways to start a career in music" should be waaaay down on your list of concerns.
musicians are not really "any type of venture".
If they are looking for a way to make money out of their work, it is. And it is totally fine.
If they could find ways in which both them and the artists could profit from music published on the platform that lacks the commercial potential to justify a €10 subscription, this would be a win/win
Flip the equation here. The subscription is something to fund development of the platform. So anyone that wants to have a viable libre alternative to Spotify that can be useful to all indie artists should consider paying for it, even if they are not intending to sell stuff.
as smaller artists would lose money every month by trying to position themselves in the market.
They are not "losing money", they are making use of the service anyway. Any type of venture you are building incurs costs and risks, why should it be different for someone that is running an online presence?
If the developers of bandwagon were to carving exceptions for other users, pretty soon they would be taking the risks themselves of dealing with loss-leaders customers and would have to find other ways to make up for it. 10€/month is an absolute bargain for a service that will provide you a storefront and a distribution channel that can reach anyone in the world and demands absolutely nothing in return from you.
It's for django, but take a look into my ActivityPub Toolkit. It is designed to be compliant with ActivityPub and not with any particular implementation, so it should be easy for you to adapt to your own needs.
Thank you for creating a community in a topic-specific instance!
TANSTAAFL. If people refuse to understand this very basic principle and if we don't collectively start putting our own resources on the line to invest in ethical alternatives, we will never be able to have a sustainable alternative that is not dependent on Venture Capitalists. Everything wrong with Surveillance Capitalism can be traced back to the point where people started expecting to get things for free when they should be asking themselves "What is the catch?".