I don't believe artists get paid enough. I think corporations take extremely high percents for work they're no doing. I also think DRM is harmful and annoying and bought music should be DRM free.
PowerMusic is a decentralized network to return the power to the artists. They can hook up a server to sell music from at any time, and the music always stays with them. They can take the server down at any time and walk away. Unlike running their own webstore, every user of PowerMusic can see and purchase from the artists' stores just with their client. This provides a mush larger userbase, better interface, but high levels of control.
The network is maintained by community authorization nodes, who also check payment info.
It was built using NodeJS and Cloudinary.
To use Cloudinary as we truly wanted, we needed the enterprise plan, so we ended up having to cut back on how much of Cloudinary we used. This was frustrating. I also connected to the wrong server a couple times...
I'm proud of the web UI that exists and that we got a demo done. Just being able to say I did it is great.
The things I were were more societal than logical. I didn't learn a lot about code in general. I mean, I did learn the Cloudinary API. This year, I really hung out with a few other devs and worked with another on part of my project, and that was great.
PowerMusic still needs more functionality in its UI, to handle the network better as right now a lot of the code for that is just stumps as I was only building on a single computer. The auth server needs to be able to kick artists off, have network reputation, and more... That said, as I have a startup, a job, and school, I will not be able to work full time on this.
--Luke Parker
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