Average fediverse user seeing a platform undergo changes they dislike:

For me the most important criterias are:

• ownership: I buy, I get to download (re-download) the files and use then how ever I please
• astists get a fair share: I want to maximize the share of the money I've spent going to the artists, and I would like the platform to be transparent, showing me with each purchase how much goes to the artitst for creating more art (if self-hosted by the artist herself/himself, this cost is then deduced)

I personally don't care for streaming.

Funkwhale is the fedi alternative for music. You should go post your feature list onto their forum.

I just took a look at faircamp, it seems nice too.

Dogmazic.net is also a music platform (centralised) made with ampache.

I've been thinking a lot about this. I think a fedi-connected, self-hosted Bandcamp alternative would be huge for discoverability and helping fans keep tabs on new releases, tour dates, etc... As a musician it'd be great to be able to have fans be alerted right away when you post a new track or tour date, and as a fan it'd be awesome to be able to follow artists that you like from other fedi-compatible platforms.

I'm not a web dev myself so I don't really know for sure, but I think the biggest challenge is probably not even content delivery but keeping track of ownership/library. It's really nice that you can log into Bandcamp and access a library of all of the albums/songs that you've previously bought, and I'm not sure how something like that could be emulated in a federated way. It might be possible, I just don't know how!

Also it'd be nice to be able to stream your library, and when your library is distributed across multiple federated servers I don't know if that becomes more difficult to implement.

Still, I'm with you. I'd love to see a federated alternative to Bandcamp, even if it takes some years to reach maturity or feature parity.

One thing that most reddit alumni won't care about, but one of the nicest things about doing it decentralized is censorship resistance.

Bandcamp at some point decided that the political views of the artists on their platform are a reason to get rid of some artists.

You might not see a problem since you agree with bandcamp's politics, but companies change their politics on a dime when it becomes useful to do so.

One problem with open source commercial sites is you're typically going to need business partners to handle credit card transactions.

Been using self-hosted, static website builder https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ with satisfying results here

Take a look at this project started with many of those goals in mind: https://code.communitymedia.network/MountainTownTechnology/aural_isle

Has there been any purchasable content in the Fediverse so far?

Do you know this: https://radiofreefedi.net/

All of these ideas are great and all but at the end of the day I will be forced to use what ever the scene I am into decides is best and therefore I can find the biggest selection of music to buy.

Currently band camp is the defacto for most releases (except for some idiotic vinyl only bullshit) within the scene I am into, but even if a great alternative is made if they don't start selling the music I want on there then it'll be impossible for me to use.

I think as much effort to expose a band camp alternative to artists is needed as there is needed to create the thing so people and artists can come together in said place.

Time to go back to limewire

Wait, hear me out. Direct buy from artists using crypto. Then you don't have to deal with payment processors.