Bandwagon

Bandwagon.fm is the home for indie musicians and bands. Fans can discover new music, follow, and connect, with 100% of album sales going direct to the artists themselves.

Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@benpate
BenPate.dev: https://benpate.dev/@ben

Last Notes

2024-12-09 00:46:39 GMT

If you've been following my profile on Mastodon (@npub17gq…8hhz) you may have seen me wrestling with free vs. paid pricing. There are some great ideas out there.
I was talking with one wagoneer who made a really good case for having some kind of free tier. I still have to work out the details. And there's the minor issue of actually building out the software to support it.
But the short result for now is that I'm committing to continuing some kind of free profiles on Bandwagon.fm from now forward. The exact composition is still TBD, and please know that some current features of the "beta test" may end up requiring a premium membership. But one way or another, I'll figure out how to make real, high quality Fediverse profiles free for any musician who wants one.

2024-10-22 16:36:14 GMT

Hey all.. I want to share some big updates under the hood of Bandwagon.fm.
Bandwagon is meant to be a universal connection to as many of your fans and listeners as possible. And today I think I've crossed one of the last hurdles, and brought us one step closer to that goal.
Without getting too technical, Bandwagon can now communicate with Mastodon servers that use "Secure Mode" (aka "Authorized Fetch"). This is an admin setting in Mastodon that requires others (like Bandwagon) to sign all of their requests before communicating, and it's there to make it harder for the bad guys to scrape content from your Mastodon profiles.
The end result is that you should now be able to follow Bandwagon.fm profiles from any Mastodon server -- no matter what admin settings the mods have chosen.
I've been chasing this down with the help, patience, and grace of several of your fellow artists. So big thanks to Stefan Bohacek, Ethical Revolution, and Jux for helping to make this happen.
There's no rest for the wicked. I'm continuing to work on making this a better, more robust, and more resilient platform for great indie music, and will be posting more updates here as soon as I can.

2024-09-12 23:30:13 GMT

It looks like there was a problem with the new "signup" feature that prevented people from creating new profiles. I'm sorry. Fortunately, it's all resolved now, and signups are working great.
So please tell your friends, families, and pets that they can finally put their music directly on the Fediverse. I'm looking forward to hearing how it goes for everyone!