The Interledger Community 🌱: Simon Metson

XRPLoop

Simon Metson — Mon, 08 May 2023 15:39:01 +0000

Last month I entered Unlocking the Potential of XRP Ledger with a proof of concept XRP-only Coil replacement, XRPLoop. It's very, very much only a proof of concept, but I thought some folk here might be interested. I think it could be deployable in a decentralised way, so multiple people could run an instance of it (thinking about things like deploying to Functions as a Service platforms...).

Appreciate it's not interledger, but it does allow for something approximating web monetisation.

Again, it's definitely not code you'd want to run in anything like production, and there's a fair bit of work needed to get to that, but if people here are interested in collaborating that'd be very cool.

Wallet discovery from an ILP pointer

Simon Metson — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 23:45:58 +0000

Is there a way to go from an ILP pointer to a wallet address? If I have an XRP wallet (for example) is there a simple way to send from it to an ILP?

Mastodon & WebMonetization

Simon Metson — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 01:06:21 +0000

Has anyone looked into adding WebMonetization into Mastodon? It seems like it could solve some problems:

people running instances could recieve payment for folk visiting them
people posting could be paid for their content

There'd be some awkward/interesting UX questions, but nothing insurmountable.

Given the hooha with the bird site, thought this might be a nice idea for someone.

Write about music, get ILP payments

Simon Metson — Sat, 13 Aug 2022 10:54:00 +0000

We've been updating Audiotarky and one of the features we've added is an area for blogs. We're interviewing some of our artists, and have approached a few artists to do guest blogs. Blogs have an ILP so their authors recieve streamed payment when someone with Coil reads them.

I thought it might be of interest to the community here, and have hastily pulled together a Google form to collect submissions. If you want to review a release or write about music in general, I'd be interested in seeing what you've got to say. No guarantees that submissions will go on the site, things off topic, boring, illegal, offensive etc certainly won't, and content may get edited.

Happy to answer any questions as comments.
Cheers
Simon

PS. If you know musicians who'd be interested in having their music on the site, do point them our way.

Diverse income streams for musicians via web monetisation — Grant Report #2

Simon Metson — Thu, 26 Aug 2021 21:42:01 +0000

Project Update

first report is here

We've launched the site publicly, officially "at" Mozfest which saw a nice bump in traffic. We've also had some local press which got us some interest from artists. We'd had a target of 50 bands/artists on the site by the end of the grant and now have 177 (with 671 tracks between them) - so that's nice! Streamed payments to the site have covered hosting costs for the coming months, which I think is another, slightly smaller, success.

The album the grant funded has been released. Without any promotion (beyond sending the link to friends) it's made about the same as selling a CD. Again, not setting the world alight, but a decent starting point, and proof that the model works for small independent artists.

Progress on objectives

All the objectives have been met. We've released the site and its been a factor 3 more popular than we'd aimed for, with fairly minimal marketing budget and a very "MVP" UX for artists (sorry for the google forms!).

We've open sourced some components, but not had much response to them to date.

The album the grant funded has been released.

Key activities

I think we've achieved most of what was intended. I'd hoped to be able to provide some numbers around streams & associated payments, but we didn't collect sufficient data to demonstrate anything clearly. I can say of the |approx 2000 streams from mid-May to mid-August, almost half were done with Coil. We also decided early on to move away from the "scraps" idea in the original submission, and it's interesting to read the experience of the freesound team who ran into similar issues to what made us rethink.

Communications and marketing

I think we underestimated the amount of work here. We need to address the following issues;

a number of vastly larger and better known incumbents (Spotify, Soundcloud, Bandcamp etc.) - why should an artist spend the time to get an ILP enabled wallet and upload tracks to a new service?
WebMonetisation/Coil is still new technology - this is limiting both as its an extra hurdle for artists and the number of paying listeners is small (but hopefully growing)
a lot of FUD around anything/everything crypto (though I think Coil do a good job of making this transparent)

We had a good message, but needed to get that out at a scale and that wasn't what our grant was capable of funding.

What’s next?

The site essentially pays for itself currently (its hosting fees are modest) so keeping it online and growing organically and improving incrementally is the current plan.

We've applied for a grant from Ripple to build an NFT market place on top of what is already in place - if we get that we can build more and faster. We're thinking we can do something interesting combining NFTs and WebMonetisation. Off the back of that making some more of the "back office" infrastructure would be required. Today we don't need an artist login, which is a benefit of Web Monetisation, but with the NFT stuff we will. This means building an auth{z,n} system, better track upload experience and being "closer" to the wallet & XRP ledger.

Rafiki from Coil is interesting, too, and hopefully easily adopted. We've added a similar, but less sophisticated, feature to the site to allow for "direct artist support". Replacing that with Rafiki would be good.

What community support would benefit your project?

Help spread the word! If you hear something you like on Audiotarky use the share links to tell your friends (and let them know you're using Coil too)!

Additional comments

This has been a great experience, thanks to the organisers & backers, to all the artists that have signed up and listeners who've streamed.

Anyone remember webrings?

Simon Metson — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 22:33:28 +0000

Back in the day there were web rings, a simple way to help people find sites that were related and foster a bit of community.

I wonder if there’s something that the WM community could do to help build that sort of network effect. People coming to a WM enabled site with Coil installed are probably interested in finding other WM enabled sites...

Audiotarky — Diverse income streams for musicians via web monetisation

Simon Metson — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 14:21:04 +0000

Project overview

We offer a grass roots ethical streaming platform for music lovers and creators that prioritises fairness & privacy over algorithms & shareholders. People listening to music on Audiotarky use Coil to pay the artists directly. Payments to creators start at $0.36 an hour and we believe this to be the highest “pay per stream” rate out there. Payment is direct from the listener to the artist; we don’t pool payments & divide them up according to an oblique algorithm, nor do you have to “pay to play”.

Network effects on such sites are key to engage consumers. By building this platform we can focus Coil enabled listeners onto a network of musicians, letting them share their music & receive web monetisation payments. Our platform also prioritises user privacy; music is personal & you shouldn’t have to sacrifice privacy for convenience.

Project team

Simon, Matt, Ali, Ben, Andrew & Michael.

What we are doing

We're aiming to help grassroots musicians get some reasonable income from streaming. With Coils $0.36 payment, 20 people streaming an hour long album (or one person streaming it 20 times) is about the same as buying a CD.

We’re launching the first version of the platform at #mozfest & we’re calling on musicians, bands, producers and labels to join our beta program to help us iron out any glitches in the system as we launch.

As a thank you for taking part, we’re rewarding the first 50 participants with a £50 reward upon completion of the sign up process. If you’re an artist or label that would like to get involved with this initiative, please fill out our expression of interest form.

What community support would benefit your project?

A willingness from both creators and consumers to interact with the platform and provide feedback on their user experience so as to help us test its efficacy and improve our offering.

In addition to this we are also relying on users and fans of the initiative to help us raise awareness about the platform and our ethos among their networks; support and backing from the music and web monetisation communities at large will be integral to us being able to grow and develop the platform further.

Link Round Up!

Highlight other projects

We've been working with kendraio & Sweet Life Records. You should check them out, too!

Anyone using PayString (formerly PayId)?

Simon Metson — Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:14:53 +0000

It’s seems to have moved on quite a bit since I last looked at it in the summer (and not just the name change). Anyone using it successfully?

My “old” id seems partially valid, but the new OpenPayments seems stricter...

Diverse income streams for musicians via web monetisation — Grant Report #1

Simon Metson — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 18:52:08 +0000

Image

Project Update

The project is launching under the brand Audiotarky, and is currently in a private beta (we're letting people know about the site, but the root URL is still a placeholder).

Like so many others, we have definitely seen the impact of covid on planned work - making certain things we'd planned to do take longer or not be possible (see below). Two team members have changed jobs and one has become a grandad during the project. Life, finds a way.

We've open sourced some of the underlying code, and have some more components to release in the coming months.

Progress on objectives

We have built a site that facilitates musicians getting directly paid through web monetisation. This has some nice benefits for the listeners too; we can serve them great music without needing to know anything about them. We don't need to track their habits, or even know who they are - if they have a WM enabled browser they can listen to music & pay the people who made it. We're in beta currently, but should be publicly available in the next month.

Pulling together the various pieces is nearly complete, the project is now switching to one of promotion, open sourcing components & writing up what we've done & what has been learned along the way.

Key activities

The site has launched as a private beta. We are working on signing up more artists as I type, and expect to make the site publicly available by end of Feburary. We've focussed on the "consumer" end of the application - letting people listen to music, monetised via WM, in a privacy centric manner.

On reflection the idea of "scraps" doesn't fit WM so well, as scraps are less "engaging" (you'd download the pieces in seconds and play/use them offline) but is good for more general micropayment models. I plan to add a simple version of this to the site post-launch, but would be interested in ideas for how others have done micropayment (as opposed to streamed payments) or addressed offline use cases. One approach would be a VST or other such plugin which streamed payment as people used the scraps, but this would be a substantial piece of development.

We've been documenting progress and deliverables approx. monthly on our blog. We have posts on how the T&Cs work & how the brand developed planned, as well as a few "how we've done X" type of posts and a short update on the tech stack used.

We've open sourced a key piece of the technology stack in (and announced here). This lets others build payment verification into their applications more easily.

We have done the first 2 days of recording, with 6 tracks laid down, and have 4 more scheduled in Feburary. Mastering it should be relatively quick, and this should complete the album in March.

Covid lockdowns have made scheduling these sessions more difficult (lots of moving parts). The original idea was to have these recordings as the first "proof point" content on the site, and to have a videographer document the sessions to be used as content marketing for the project.

Given the lockdowns in the UK, the videographer became impractical and we've had delays getting into the studio, so we've shifted to getting more musicians involved (see next section), and filed for a budget reallocation to redirect funds accordingly. This hopefully gives us sufficient data to prove the model (or otherwise). I plan to make said data public, and keep it current after the grant period as part of the transparency efforts around Audiotarky itself.

Communications and marketing

As mentioned above, covid lockdowns have delayed recording sessions for the planned album, and made professionally documenting those recording sessions impractical, so we've switched tack and redirected budget to help promote to other artists. Part of this redirected budget will be used to bolster the planned reward payments to creators. The remainder will be used to pay for a marketing consultant to initially help get artists (we're aiming for ~50 in the next month or two) signed up to the site, and then encourage users to come listen!

What’s next?

What remains?

doing the other parts of my grant report!
completing the album, releasing it under Creative Commons through Audiotarky
signing up more artists & responding to feedback from the beta program
starting to collect and publish data about usage & payment
start the data pipeline for reporting on the platform long term
further blogs on how the site works

I'd hoped to have a decently sized "data set" by the end of the grant, but I think we'll be only have a month or so of data. I think for a site like Audiotarky its important to make much of this data public, and plan to have it collected & presented automatically into the future. I'd be interested to know whether this would be worth getting a grant extension for, or not.

What community support would benefit your project?

Feedback on the pieces we've opened sourced would be very welcome, as would patches/bug reports/improvement suggestions.

General advice/ideas on how to encourage people not familiar with WM to use it (as either a creator or consumer) would be very welcome - I think this echoes comments on a few other reports. There seems to be a gap in the market to allow someone to send modest amounts of money to an ILP, without the need of a third party tool - maybe something to look at in future grants?

We'd be really keen to see more artists come our way, and for folk to come listen :) Feedback (and forgiveness as we iterate!) as comments on this post would be amazing. Really interested to compare notes with others doing work in the WM/Music space, too.

Additional comments

Registering with the IRS was an unexpected ... joy, and one that would be useful to highlight for future grant rounds (at least to people like me!)

Relevant links/resources (optional)

Private beta
WM verification flask server

Helping on board contributors with an ILP validator

Simon Metson — Wed, 06 Jan 2021 01:19:57 +0000

I wrote a silly ILP validation UI after one of my beta users had issues. I’m fairly sure there are others out there already, so wondered what other folk were doing?

It’s a jump for people beyond this community, but one that needs to be made for it to be successful & grow. How are people addressing that? How do you answer “I’ve got a PayPal, why can’t I use that?” usefully?

Python WM verifying server

Simon Metson — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 22:56:35 +0000

I’ve released a simple demo server using python/flask which verifies payment via Vanilla. You can find it on github. Contributions, questions, suggestions welcome. I learned of the WM public verification server in this thread and will be adding support for that soon.

The server works by creating a session when a client has a verified payment, and provides a simple bit of client side code to trigger that when a payment is made. It’s meant as a demo/inspiration currently, but will do some work to package it up a bit more formally & add some tests if there’s interest.

SEC suit, Coil & web monetisation

Simon Metson — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 11:57:33 +0000

With the SEC lawsuit against Ripple, where does that leave Web Monetisation & Coil?

I get that WM is independent (ish) of the digital currency used, but these sort of events do cause reputational issues.

If I understand right, Coil relies on XRP to function (though I assume could use a different currency for exchange?), will the SEC cause problems there? Will the Coil use case be useful for the Ripple case?

Is this also another pointer to the need for other WM providers as called out here, possibly using a different digital currency?