at the moment the vast majority of the posts on this sub are links to youtube videos of songs, which is in my opinion unfortunate for several reasons
youtube audio is trash, so you're either have to subject yourself to this abomination or simply listen to this song your preferred way (piracy/streaming services) at which point you might as well just post the name of the song without any links
and also by linking to a youtube video of a song you're not only not supporting the original composer, but at the same time supporting google, which sucks
if the artist produces music under a free license or publishes their music outside of proprietary platforms then you should probably link straight to the source
i'm not quite sure what the perfect solution to that would be
simply linking pirated flacs (or other high fidelity audio codec of your choice) of the albums/songs would be cool, and we would end up with a neat music collection here, but that would basically equate lemmy to torrent trackers in the eyes of companies and governments, which would result in it being blocked and suppressed on other platforms
but by linking to streaming platform albums/songs you are effectively supporting the very meh status quo of music production/distribution
what are your thoughts on this?
I tend to think this is the kind of thing where you should try starting a different community with stricter rules, put in the effort to populate it with initial content, and see what people gravitate towards.
Another alternative would be for bots to exist that would automate looking up alternate links / artist profiles; I have one of those in matrix and it's quite nice. I think the devs' goals are to keep such bots off the flagship, but that's another "split off and see how it goes" option.
interesting! could you link the bot pls?
https://mau.dev/maubot/songwhip
I'm not sure if Songwhip has bandcamp, but the concept's clear.