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Twilight Sparkle ✨

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Pony.fm.png

 

The My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fandom is pretty amazing, if for no other reason than that it creates stuff. A lot of stuff.

 

Paintings and plushies, applications and animation, stories and stained-glass windows, comics and conventions, websites and whatnot - you name it, we make it.

 

All this content needs to go somewhere, of course. But not everyone can put a website together or have the resources available to keep their work online should it ever become popular. That's where SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms come in - an SaaS provides a service, like blog hosting (think Blogger or WordPress.com), that lets you focus on creating and publishing content without worrying about the technological challenges of doing so or keeping it available during high traffic.

 

Pony.fm is an SaaS for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fan music. The site's purpose is simple - to provide an easy solution for brony composers, arrangers, and otherwise musically talented individuals to get their music online and get it out there.

 

Bandcamp, YouTube, and SoundCloud are currently the most popular venues I see pony music being released through. While there's nothing inherently wrong with that, they're not exactly ideal. For one, they impose limits on free downloads (with the exception of YouTube) - this alone creates a great deal of annoyance for many artists, since most of them release their music for free. YouTube does not impose such limits, but as a video-sharing site, it's hardly even appropriate to begin with - as a matter of fact, it doesn't even offer downloads.

 

The other key disadvantage is that these large SaaS's interfaces and feature sets are not specifically tailored for our fandom. Building an SaaS for bronies brings with it the unique opportunity to create a truly special resource for sharing and discovering content, like organizing content using taxonomies based on the show. That's something that no general-purpose SaaS can get away with.

 

As Pony.fm nears the alpha testing stage, I'm excited to begin sharing some concrete updates and information on its progress. I'll use this blog to write about new features, reflect on my experiences as a developer, and keep track of project milestones over time.

 

Follow it if you want to keep up with news on the pony music hosting site!

  • Brohoof 17

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Do NOT want. A TERRIBLE idea honestly. It will only scatter out everything more, because some people will put their shit up on this thing, most of them will on youtube, it will become a mess.

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Do NOT want. A TERRIBLE idea honestly. It will only scatter out everything more, because some people will put their shit up on this thing, most of them will on youtube, it will become a mess.

Actually I think it's a great idea! Youtube is anoying for downloading music because a download link must be provided. Bandcamp is alright but it lacks feedback adn compatibility for single releases. (They take up a lot of space.)

 

I imagine Pony.FM as a Soundcloud dedicated to brony artists, and I think it makes it more organized.

 

If people post trolling audio and crap that's clearly intended as rude and/or meant for "trolling" then it's dealt with swiftly by a staff member. Simple as that! ^_^

  • Brohoof 4
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I understand you want to make it possible for musicians to freely share their stuff, but will there also be options for those who wish to make a bit of money by sales or donations?

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  • Founder

I understand you want to make it possible for musicians to freely share their stuff, but will there also be options for those who wish to make a bit of money by sales or donations?

 

Not in the alpha, or probably the beta either. Payments are a popular request and something I definitely want to add to Pony.fm in some form, but they call for a detailed legal investigation that I simply do not have the time for right now. There are more important things to take care of... like getting the site into a presentable state. :)

  • Brohoof 2
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Sounds like a wonderful Ideal! If you're looking for technical help, I would love to help!

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I see that MLPF is linked on the Pony.fm homepage... are they purely affiliates, or does Pony.fm a subsidiary of MLPF? 

 

Did you code this entirely by yourself, Feld0? :D

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  • Founder

I see that MLPF is linked on the Pony.fm homepage... are they purely affiliates, or does Pony.fm a subsidiary of MLPF? 

 

Did you code this entirely by yourself, Feld0? :D

 

Pony.fm and MLP Forums are sister sites. Although MLP Forums will be Pony.fm's primary "backer" in the early phases, I hope that it will develop an identity and personality of its own. Since I own them both, however, a deeper relationship between them than a simple affiliation can and will exist - expect to see some tight integration and cross-site content sharing, for example.

 

Apart from a few libraries and a framework I used to make my life easier (things like FFmpeg, LAME, libvorbis, etc.), Pony.fm is all my work. :)

  • Brohoof 2
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  • Founder
Will this be like turntable.fm?

 

I'm not familiar with Turntable.fm, but it looks like a real-time social music sharing service based on its Wikipedia page.

 

Pony.fm is nothing like that; it is more in the vein of deviantART, in that artists upload their work to it, and it becomes part of a larger, asynchronous social network when they do so.

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