What if you, as a DJ, could provide music for several venues, all at once? That’s a question one Kickstarter entrepreneur, Neil Scudder, is hoping to answer with a system called Playnode. Reading through the Kickstarter page and watching a few videos, I was left wondering how this would relate to DJWORX and to DJs generally. Then I noticed a little line in the email…
The vision here is to explore the development of an online marketplace, one where DJs can lease their playlists to different businesses (in a distributed, decentralized fashion), and payments handled automatically.
This could well be a way to bring digital DJing into its next phase, properly leveraging the internet for our craft. And what about distributing the playlists? Centralised servers are so 2004. Which is where Bittorrent Sync comes in. A file sharing system similar to Dropbox or Google Drive, BT Sync has the leg up in that it leverages the power of the internet’s most controversial technology… Bittorrent.
Restaurants, bars, cafes, bookstores, supermarkets; anywhere that needs background music; get a system that gives control via a smartphone or tablet, and choice of a marketplace for musical playlists to suit any needs.
DJs get to make a bit of cash from those precious libraries, all legal and fair:
What if each consumer did not increase the cost of distribution? It would cost no more to distribute one media file to a million consumers than it did to one. It defies conventional logic, but it is actually a much more natural way to use the Internet than centralized distribution. This is what BitTorrent makes possible, and it has lowered the barrier to entry for individuals to distribute digital media.
In the future we would like to register everybody in a marketplace where anyone with a Playnode can lease music from any DJ with music to lease. A business owner could browse and preview DJ playlists on her phone, choose to lease one, pay the fee immediately through the app. DJs would receive all the money minus transaction fees, in a lump sum each month.
The business owner would pay Playnode Control every month for access to such a service. This service plan would include the Playnode and cover the music licensing fees owed by their business, as well as priority overnight hardware replacement insurance.
My Take
I love that this feels almost grass-roots. The man behind this is cleverly using off-the-shelf technology to create a smart system for playing music. From running an app on old iPods and tablets, to using a Raspberry Pi as a media server, the idea is clever. But it’s a very niche idea, we need to be convinced how easy it is to set up, and how the marketplace would work. And how reliant on a good internet connection is it?
For Playnode, I’d suggest making a really nice, slick video, showing real-world use of the system. And some good information on the marketplace idea would be useful to show DJs what it’s about.
Like what you see? Support Playnode on Kickstarter, and read more on the Bittorrent blog.