GnukeBox/design
Design Spec
- Status: This is a first pass at laying out the overall design and fleshing in some of the details. It has not yet been reviewed by any other team members, and I expect it will change and evolve considerably before implementation.
- History:
- 2013-09-17 key features discussed in email
- 2013-09-22 started work on first wiki page version of design spec
Introduction
GnukeBox is a software application intended for multiple platforms, with emphasis on mobile devices and entertainment hardware. It will have both standalone capabilities and capabilities requiring support from a server back-end. As many features as possible should remain available when the internet is inaccessible. It will also have the ability to generate collections of media which can be played without the application, subject to licensing restrictions.
Its key innovation is its ability to provide free music-on-demand in a way which enables and encourages financial support for those who have put their work into that music. The most obvious way it does this is by providing the opportunity for "free plays" of a given track without necessarily releasing that track "into the wild", where it might be easily copied to other devices and the artist's needs forgotten -- but there are others; see /revenue.
When we say "music", this should be read to mean any kind of audio/visual recording or performance. Most of the recordings in the catalog will probably be music and most of the artists will probably be musicians, but there will undoubtedly be many other kinds of recordings (audio books, drama, comedy) and artists.
Features
Its features can be broadly categorized as:
- media
- commerce
- informational
- social
Media Features
Gnukebox will play individual tracks and videos as well as playlists.
- play tracks
- play videos
Informational Features
- show performance schedules
Commerce Features
- sell mp3s
- sell physical goods (music/video media and tie-in merch)
- collect email addresses
- sell event tickets
- show advertisements from 3rd parties
Social Features
- build fans using Facebook, G+, and Twitter
- interoperate with G+ Hangouts somehow
- listener ratings
- listener commenting
We will probably need some kind of reputation management to ... this could easily turn into its own social network, complete with a need to minimize spam, trolling, and other abuse, so this aspect of the design should be approached with caution. It may be that we will want to make that a separate phase of the software's development.
That said, as simple way to minimize trolling, as a stop-gap, might be to only allow customers, or those who have paid memberships (e.g. to make the ads disappear), to post comments.
There are open-source federatable social networks that could be adapted, which would further allow us to take advantage of the network effect to gain publicity.