Let’s spin-off this conversation about a plan on Bitwish to share music creations. We can start this project as soon as we are clear on some basic ideas. We can always fine tune and improve.
Implementing the technical part of this subproject is easy. The challenge is to attract the creators of music produced with Bitwig. What they want? What can we offer them?
Thanks for taking the initiative on this project. I really like what you’ve done so far. Especially the Bitwig Video Guide is a valuable resource for me.
I would like a place for people to receive constructive feedback on their creations, but unfortunately, people have a tendency to just post their own tracks without giving feedback themselves. I’ve seen a some systems to mitigate this issue and here’s my suggestion based on what I’ve learned working with them.
The best way to motivate someone to give feedback is to make it a requirement before they are allowed to post their own tracks. Unfortunately, that often leads to lackluster feedback so we need another mechanism to encourage quality.
I suggest a point system where you collect points by providing feedback and you can spend those points to post your own tracks. Each feedback earns you one point and the person receiving the feedback has the opportunity to reward you with additional points (up to a limit). That means the better your feedback, the more points you receive.
It’s also difficult to provide feedback on tracks you don’t understand at all because they are so different from what you like, so I think it’s good to have a wide variety of tracks to choose from. So it should be possible to also earn points from older submissions too, not just the most recent ones.
To avoid spam from someone who collected a ton of points and then posts dozens of tracks at once, there should be a expiration date for points (I suggest three months) and a limit to how many tracks you can post (I suggest one per day).
Of course, I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement on discourse, so it will probably need to be adapted and simplified.
I’d be happy to hear everyone’s thoughts on this.
Thank you @Fooltopia for these ideas.
Same! This is why your comments encouraged me to start this discussion. We are going to get a space to share music on Bitwish out of this. 
Where have you seen this problem, exactly? I can say that I have been one of those, posting one track hoping to get feedback, being disappointed because I didn’t get much, but… also not spending much time giving feedback to others. True.
However, I have to say that one big problem was the type of communication channel, that wasn’t inviting at all to leave feedback. I’m talking about these “share your tracks” mega-topics where submissions and comments are all thrown together. Not inviting, and rather confusing. Also, these threads are placed in some dark corner as in "don’t bother the main channel with your tracks, just go to that distant corner, publish your unimportant stuff, and let us have here the important conversations in peace. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating, but you get my point?
Here we can offer creators a first class space, with own topics, embedded players, possibility to embed or upload artwork, 
s, upvotes, tags…
About giving feedback, it is more rewarding for the same reasons, and also because of Discourse trust levels and the engagement model in general. Nothing to do with KVR or Reddit.
First, I will say that especially at the beginning we should have the lowest entry barrier possible. As in just sharee your music and thank you so much. We need to create a new space, a new routine, and right now we cannot offer thousands of listeners to these creators. We should be happy if they decide to include us to their list of places to promote a new track.
But moving forward, I see your point. If we do have many tracks featured but very few comments, I agree that we should think how to make this more sustainable. I am not aware of any Discourse plugin that provides the features you describe, but we could start with a simpler version on that, based on trust level and/or a special badge that people would get after posting under certain conditions (can be technically done automatically, I believe).
How does this sound?
By the way, to launch this msuic sharing space we only need 1-2 more people willing to give it a shot. That’s it. If these people show up here and we agree on the basics to start, we just start, even in the next week(s).
You’re right. I was thinking way too far ahead here and taking my negative experiences from other places with me.
This is a new space where we can start over and try doing better. When problems show up we can try to deal with them in a way that fits this community.
And especially in the beginning, manual moderation shouldn’t be a problem. Automated systems come later when it becomes too much work for moderators to handle.
I really like your approach to community building and I hope it attracts the right people.
Thank you! Your feedback about real experiences is useful. In community management it’s good to have a fair combination of optimism and skepticism. 
I have made the first post editable by anyone, so we can put together a plan.
What do you think about the categories and tags proposed? I can set up a prototype quickly (meaning, muted categories where we can post a couple of examples without bothering anyone).
Once we have a decent prototype we could start contacting people releasing tracks made with Bitwig. Going directly to the KVR, Reddit and Discord threads/channels could easily bring a backlash. I guess we’ll have to start contacting people one by one. Any ideas?
I’ve been thinking a bit more about this, and Instead of creating a place to share your music, it might be better to create a place to talk about your music.
I imagine an environment that fosters deeper discussions about our creations rather than a place to look for new listeners.
One way to achieve this would be to have the creator answer a few questions when posting like
I imagine that this would make it easier for listeners join a discussion and help the creator improve their music even further.
But I like the idea of letting people share their project files too. This provide some interesting insights into how someone approaches production in Bitwig. Although it also depends on how many third-party plugins someone uses.
What do you think?
I don’t have much experience with this, but I can imagine that people won’t be happy if we start promoting a direct competitor in their space. I think our best bet would be to keep promoting Bitwish as a platform to discuss new features and then make it easy find the music discussion forum. A closer integration with Bitwiggers will probably also send a few users this way.
I have to say that I’m not very good at approaching people, so I won’t be much help in this regard.
What a wonderful idea! Technically easy to implement and it turns the thing in something completely different.
We need to consider that there are many people who love to produce music and are very good at it, but don’t feel comfortable writing too much or at all publicly (from personal character to English fluency and etc). I’m sure there are ways to design a simple process that feels welcoming for them as well.
“Do you welcome improvements or alternative versions?”
Imagine, people could respond with .bwproject files as well.
We could use tags for this, starting with #pure-bitwig or something like that. Those using only native devices or widely used free plugins will have higher chances of finding collaborators. Then again, one can see how this may also create clusters of users of specific instruments or effects, just like now there is an explosion of Bitwig + VCV Rack activity.
I can see this working out. The take-off won’t be easy, but as we add new things to Bitwish, attracting people for one reason or another should be a bit easier every week. Let’s work on a 0.1 version and I’ll start pinging Bitwig users publishing new music.
You’re right that my proposal might be a bit much for most people who just want to post their music and build a fan base.So we could take your structure and whoever wants to add more information to their submission is free to do so.
Maybe with an optional template that invites people to share more about their ideas behind the music, but if someone just wants to drop a link, that’s fine too.
Unfortunately, I have trouble finishing things, so I can’t contribute very much myself in terms of music, but I’ll be happy to join the conversation if someone shares their music here.
I’ve got an idea that tries to combine all these factors.
Imagine this category structure:
Now let’s focus on the main Music category and the Tracks subcategory.
The Tracks subcategory works with the system you propose: people submitting their tracks must come with a story. One track one topic. We offer a default template that people can follow or throw away an explain something about the track however they wish.
The Music main category includes two monthly topics where even a link without any information is accepted (conditions apply, see below):
The technical features of these monthly topics would be the same as Bitwig Video Guide Selection - December 2021
, comment, and upvote each track (upvotes are limited)If there is enough participation, at the end of the month we will have two topics filled with tracks, ranked by votes just for the fun of it.
This means that we have three levels for music submissions:
From there we’d jump to Albums and Artists, more involved, deeper connections.
I’m not quite sure I understand the structure you’re describing, but here are my suggestions based on how I understand it.
I’ll explain the purpose of each category below and I’m curious what everyone thinks about my suggestion.
This is where we can get really cozy and talk about our music and motivations behind it. Hopefully, this will evolve into a safe space where new friendships will be formed and ideas brought to life.
I really like your idea of a monthly thread where people can post music made in Bitwig and vote for the music they like the most.
Although I don’t see why we’d need two different categories for posting tracks. Do you really expect such a large number of tracks made in Bitwig by people who aren’t in this community? Maybe start with one and split it up if it gets too crowded?
I think it can be really discouraging to come to a new place and see almost no activity, so I think it would be better to also merge Tracks and Albums until we start some real activity.
And the Album category will probably see even less submissions since people rarely create full albums anymore.
So I would suggest one thread per month were people can post whatever as long as it contains music made with Bitwig and was released that month, even if it’s just one part like in short films or commercials.
What type of discussion do you imagine for the Artist category? I mean promoting yourself is one thing, but this being such a small userbase (at least for now), I think it makes more sense to turn this into a place of mutual support and encouragement along our musical journeys.
Maybe we could talk about branding and building a fan base in way that’s true to the artistic vision and share resources that we found insightful or inspiring…
So yes, artists can share their profiles, but I would like this to be more than a place where you drop links and hope for the best.
You have very good points. I think we fully agree on the essence:
Agreed?
Let’s start with the creation of the “Music” category with one topic “Music made with Bitwig - December 2021” (names and locations can be changed later). Anyone can post links to tracks in this topic as long as they are from this month. People can post their own tracks, or they can post tracks they have found somewhere else. They can also upload the .bwproject file of their own tracks if they so wish.
And let’s see what is the response? Meanwhile, we can continue defining the other elements of this category.
Sounds good to me. Let’s give this a try and see what happens.
Let’s go! 
We have got a first repertoire of tracks and some creators signing up (including a debut!) 
. Not bad for a start.
While I’ll keep being on the look for new tracks, I think we can start trying with the feedback.
The next step is to try own topics for tracks. I liked the idea of the optional template.
About albums, I believe they still have some life thanks to i.e. Bandcamp. I agree they are not that predominant. We can wait and see if we come across enough of them to treat them differently.
Something that may be interesting is that I believe that conversations that start in a big monthly topic can be spinned-off to their own track topics if their authors want to do so.
Imagine, you are an author, post a track, turns out that it generates a lot of interesting comments… ok, then you create a new topic with that track in the first post and some comments, and then a moderator can move the comments from the monthly topic to the track topic, where they will have a longer and more on-topic life.
This would be a natural way to promote conversations.
At the moment, I think we can just leave the discussions at the monthly topic. The only downside there is that you can’t reply to a specific comment, but you can @ people if it isn’t clear who you’re responding to.
The only downside I see with the monthly thread is that it can be difficult to tell if a track was posted by the artist or someone else.
What if people want to share music published before December 2021?
Yes, indeed. This was one of the things I wanted to address when proposing a “radar” (anything found out there) separate from a thread where creators share their own music. Both things have value, just different kind of value.
Also, I was thinking, what if we create threads for the Bitwig sound packages? For instance, https://bitwish.top/t/orchestral-strings-a-new-sound-package-for-bitwig-studio/2445,. Same idea as in months, except that the common denominator is the fact of using that specific sound pack. And these ones would remain open forever.
Right. I didn’t think why anyone would want to share old music 
Okay. Then maybe you should go back to that?
If you use two (or more) sound packs, do you post it in both (all) threads then?
To be honest, I don’t really understand what your vision for this space is. Maybe this is all too complicated and everyone should just create a new thread if they want to post a song. This seems to work for other places.
Maybe it is complicated indeed. 
The single thread is working for those who publish on the single thread, but… what about the rest? Maybe there are other formats that would encourage more people?
Also, in many cases the single thread is there only because they have been pushed by the rest of the forum/subreddit to a single thread, and you see now and then people willing to get more attention creating a topic for their new track/album.
But ok, no threads for song packages for now.
What’s the problem with letting people create new threads/topics for their songs/albums/projects/artist-profiles in the Music category?