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Music in Itch.io

A topic by sergeeo created Jan 31, 2022 Views: 1,385 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 8
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This is the first time I post in this forum, so if this message is in the wrong place, please feel free to move it where it belongs.

I have been using itch.io for quite a few years to upload my games, both jams and personal projects. The truth is that it is a platform that I like quite a lot: it works quite well as a store, as a space to share links, as a web space for personal projects, etc. On top of that, it is not very invasive and very easy to use. Congratulations for creating something like this!

This suggestion comes from the fact that, besides being a videogame creator, I am a musician, and this field -although it may seem unbelievable- is very scarce of this kind of web spaces. There is soundcloud, which is very impersonal and full of spambots and ads. There are streaming sites like Spotify, which are from my point of view an insult to creators despite being tremendously popular with consumers. There's bandcamp, which is pretty good, but lacks the freshness needed to upload your music with little hassle.

My question and suggestion: what if itch.io offered the possibility to upload and distribute music in a slightly more "official" way? Right now there's really nothing to keep you from doing that: you can upload files and offer and/or sell them without much hassle: we "only" lack a player to embed in our pages, and a "web structure" around that kind of content at most. Make that player easily shareable on twitter and I'm convinced it will be a great success.

I sincerely believe that there is a territory that bandcamp, soundcloud or other platforms don't cover. On your itch page you welcome your visitor, you offer them your menu, you leave them space to comment, you give them the possibility to buy fairly and you even have the possibility to be featured on the homepage. It would be great especially for creators of soundtracks for videogames and related genres like digital fusion. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I think itch is the ideal site for this!

Thanks

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There's so many things I would standardize on itch for if we had a nice scriptable music player

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I agree that itch.io has the potential to serve as a more open alternative to those platforms that sergeeo mentioned.

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Music making community cries in capitalism.

https://blog.bandcamp.com/2022/03/02/bandcamp-is-joining-epic/

Deleted 1 year ago

If you can create a WebGL game with some UI and soundtracks, then you can definitely create a WebGL music player, right?

In fact, if you put a bit of extra effort in, you can extend it in many interesting ways: you can add all kinds of music visualizations ("procedural music videos"), or you can create interactive content around your tracks (like Friday Night Funkin', or more subtle, like GNOG). There's nothing stopping you from doing this already on itch.io, and some people are already creating music-centered experiences.

Users can already decide to create music collections, comment and share, and you can already sell tracks.

There are some things missing that for instance Spotify has: the ability to make playlists from different creators, the whole "discoverability" aspect (like Spotify's recommendation algorithms, based on your likes), music specific tags (genres) that allow for searching, etc. However I'm not sure though whether itch.io should try to compete with Spotify this way - trying to do two things might muddle the experience and make the focus of the site unclear. And I don't think it's possible to draw the user base away from Spotify anyway. But just out of interest: which specific features would you like to have most?

Thanks for the reply!

Of course you can release music in itch, but it lacks the most important feature: a built-in player. Something like this would be great (it’s what I’m currently using): https://github.com/blackle/blamscamp I don’t think we need anything similar to Spotify, just an (official) built-in player for releases.

Having the possibility of developing musical experiences is nice, but it’s not for everyone. Many musicians aren’t into coding or just aren’t interested in doing anything beyond music.

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I think this would be a great place for a dev to step up with an simple music player. With systems already on itch, it should be as simple as dropping your lossless FLACs in a pre-made zip with the player, then uploading that to your page.


It's also worth saying you can just as easily use Youtube embeds for the same purpose

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Well, you musicians should be happy, because it looks like someone *did* go and make a music player. Here's a demo. This is Scritch, a new web player for itch pages, and it's a perfect fit for this thread. You can read about it on twitter here:

https://twitter.com/torcado/status/1508266713040703495

and there's an easy itch page to build your own here:

https://torcado.itch.io/scritch-editor

In my opinion this one has a few benefits over other linked alternatives in this thread, so there's that.

https://youtu.be/PBi9Ntpofp4