NZ Music Month Interview on Deep INsessioNZ

Discussing the.SocialMusic.Network with the SSSD

Every year in May, my longtime amigo and fellow culture jammer, the SSSD, hypes up NZ Music Month on the Deep INsessioNZ radio show, rolling out kiwi music themed shows throughout the month. This May, one of those was an interview with yours truly that dropped on 29 May (NZST/ UCT+12), about the kaupapa of the.socialmusic.network. I'm a bit slow off the mark in posting this here of course. Although I did post in advance in the fediverse, I've been too burned out to post anything long form for a couple of months, despite having a bunch of drafts that only need a final spit and polish.

Anyway, every show made for Deep INsessioNZ is still available for streaming on the Free FM website, and for download and offline listening with your podcasting app of choice (I mainly use AntennaPod on Android/Linux, installed from F-Droid). There's a treasure trove of artist interviews and musical buffets to be heard there too, and plenty more where that came from. Check it out!

My interview will be the latest episode until the end of the week, get it while it's fresh. Any thoughts about we talked about? Any questions? Some of them might be answered in this, a lightly-edited version of the discussion starter I sent SSD before the interview.

My name is Danyl Strype, commonly known as Strypey. I'm from Aotearoa, born in the lands of Waitaha and Kai Tahu in Te Wai Pounamu, currently resident by the banks of the mighty Waikato, under the mana whenua of Tainui. I'm a writer, community developer, digital permaculture designer, and performer in stage threatre, street improv, band music (Why the Tyre, Anti-Piking Unit) and musical improv (Mongolian BBQ, CBD Reality Testing Unit, Kaosphere Orchestra, Synth Obscura).

I've been involved in starting up and supporting local projects affiliated to the Indymedia activist news network, CreativeCommons, and various other international networks. I've been an active supporter and organiser for a range of community organisations in Aotearoa, including Permaculture in NZ, Norml NZ, NZ Open Source Society and the associated online services (egmastodon.nzoss.nz, chat.iridescent.nz), Loomio Cooperative, and a range of community media spaces around the country, many of which I helped to start. I'm also a longtime festival-goer since the first iteration of The Gathering (NYE 1996), and ran my own 3 night, 2 stage festival in Ōtautahi in 1998 (Psyclone). I've volunteered or crewed at many other music and arts festivals, including Soundsplash, KiwiBurn, Parihaka Peace Festival, Riverside Peace Festival, Luminate, Twisted Frequency, Splore, WOMAD, The Coro Classic, and Circulation, which I co-directed for 2 years (tip of the top hat to Xanthe Naylor who's directed it solo since) . Big ups to the festival massive, love your work!

For NZ Music Month, I'd like to introduce Deep INsessioNZ listeners to the work of the social music network, and talk about what it can teach us about doing independent music in Aotearoa. It's a project of various musicians and developers from around the world, involved in a range of independent music projects. Including some of the independent hosting platforms that have sprung up in response to the enshittification of BrandCramp, its dodgy corporate acquirers (Epic Games, Songtradr), and their mistreatment of its staff.

We aim to solve the problem of corporations using the chokepoints they create and control, as intermediaries between audiences and artists, to keep the majority of the money the former try to give to the latter. Subjugating artists as sharecroppers on enclosed commons, despite the fact they create *all* the base value music industries are built on.

Also, as a consequence of that first problem, the vicious cycle of those corporations using artists’ and audiences' money to organise against our interests. Then, as a consequence of increasingly unaccountable corporate power, the rapid enshittification of those intermediary platforms for both artists and audiences.

These were problems before the net, which many groups tried to use the net to solve in the late 1990s/ early 2000s. But they were mostly knobbled in the CopyWars (eg what happened to Napster, Grokster, GrooveShark), as entertainment corporations and trade cartels like RIAA and MPAA (backed by Useful Idiots like Metallica) pushed the line that the copyright monopoly served artists. Even as many of the artists themselves were pushing back against that claim, pointing out that the corporations had always stolen far more from artists than online "pirates" ever could. See also Courtney Love's inspired essay from 2000 in response to the file-sharing controversy, and along remarkably similar lines, Steve Albini's canonical rant published by The Baffler in 1993.

Music communities deserve better, and we can rebuild the music distribution system, we have the technology. But as we’ve seen over and over in the history of the net, without a way for many small services to pool their network effects, the only way to compete effectively with those corporations is to become one, and inevitably, to become part of the problem.

Take BrandCramp itself. In 2008 it was a scrappy startup, like Mirlo, Ampwall or Subjam, competing against huge incumbents like the iTunes Store for music sales, and Last.fm and Pandora for music discovery. Just as FarceBook was once a scrappy startup, doing adversarial interoperation with MySpace, the giant incumbent of social media (and another competitor with iTunes).

As Douglas Rushkoff explains in ‘Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus’, startups either run out of money before they became profitable and collapse, or to give them a chance to get big enough, fast enough to survive, they take money from Venture Capitalists. Forcing them inexorably towards exit by acquisition or IPO - bought by a corporation or becoming one - so the VCs can extract more money than they put in. Again, this happened before the net, eg with magazines, radio, and television. But as Rushkoff points out, something about the nature of the net means it happens much faster - within a generation rather than over several - and is much more visible.

Also, in 2026, becoming an extractor-owned music platform means something worse than just screwing musicians and music fans - which is bad enough - it means becoming part of an increasingly technofascist media system. Dominated by people people like the PayPal Mafia (Peter Thief, Melon Husk, Orange Stalin appointee David O. Sacks, and Kamala Harris backer Reid Hoffman), as well as Epstein buddy Bill Gates, and other Orange Stalin collaborators like Larry Ellison of Oracle (whose son owns Paramount and now CNN and Warner Brothers), and Marc Andreessen of HP and Ning.

So what’s the alternative to the deal with the devil (Venture Capitalists) when competing against these deep-pocketed, anti-democratic, corporate incumbents? Joining with other independent competitors to become part of something bigger, which can become more than the sum of its parts, and compete collectively against those incumbents. While each member service, under no pressure to grow like a tumour to survive, can instead grow in a sustainable way, remaining human-scale and under the control of its founding team of pro-human visionaries.

This is where the fediverse comes in, with its ActivityPub protocol, which music hosting services running Free Code sofware like FunkWhale and BandWagon already use to interconnect with each other, and with social apps like Mastodon and Lemmy. What I find exciting about the potential of integrating music services with the fediverse is that it allows 2 totally different styles of discovery to happen within a unified network; BrandCramp style browsing, and organic discovery in the wider social web. A few thoughts on each.

BrandCramp style browsing: Ideally, we'd be able to go to whichever of the federated music services provide us the most convenient search tools, and find music from any of them. A Proof of Concept for this kind of unified search experience is the cross-service search portal Unstream, maintained by industrial musician Kid Lightbulbs. The convenience of Unstream may or may not be the current reality in federated music services, but if not, that points to UX (Use Experience) work - and maybe protocol work - that needs to be done. That's part of the what the social music network is for, to coordinate the process of identifying the gaps and getting them plugged.

Organic discovery: Word-of-mouth in the fediverse/ threadiverse outside the music publishing services. Like what happens on social media platforms, but without The Algorithms of the platforms putting their thumbs on the scale. Organic discovery can be boosted by existing social web tools like searches on hastags, following artist accounts, etc. Because artist publishing accounts exist in the social network itself, and their music releases and announcements are posts in that network, they’re easy to reference and browse (via @mentions and links, which people can open in their social web apps), and artists can easily find and take part in the chatter about their music.

As I said right at the start, I'm really keen to bring some of this new hotness to the musical communities of Aotearoa, which is why I want to rant about it on Deep INsessionNZ. To that end, I've started mapping out the independent music scene here, as well as identifying the corporate platforms I'd like to see replaced with this kind of community-controlled tech. Just mapping this all out thoroughly is a *lot* of work, and I'd love to have help. If folks want to get involved, come join us on the forum!

If you want to chat to me directly about any of this, or anything curious or fun, here's my contact page.