Hey everypony! Silver Eagle here from Ponyville Live, just wanted to chime in and answer a few questions.
First of all, I'm really happy that we were able to work with the Poniverse crew on this project. Our networks have been affiliates for quite a while, but this is really the kind of potential you can see when pony projects work together for the greater good.
So, just to answer a few common questions from our end:
What happens to the Current MLP Music Archive?
For those of you who didn't know about it, until now the MLP Music Archive was essentially a giant .torrent file containing a dump of as many Brony songs as could possibly be found and catalogued.
In the almost 2-year period that Ponyville Live has maintained the MLP Music Archive, we've come to realize that there are two very distinct reasons someone would want a huge archive of all of the pony music in existence:
To create an "archive of record" of all of the art created in the Brony community, preserving it from accidental loss and artists who might leave the fandom and delete all of their music on the way out the door, and creating a genuine representation of the size and scope of the awesome stuff made by this fandom; and
To have a singular place to download music without paying or supporting the individual artists, in a way that essentially amounts to piracy within our own fandom.
While lots of people can appreciate the first mission, artists and others slowly came to resent the second, and saw the MLPMA as more of a piracy-oriented way to let people download their music without needing to support them. This was only made worse by the technology platform of the MLPMA, BitTorrent, which has earned (legitimately or otherwise) a reputation for enabling piracy.
In truth, the purpose of the MLPMA wasn't to avoid supporting the musicians, but instead to preserve and celebrate the work they put out. Without a suitable web frontend to present this archive, however, the only way to distribute that much content in a reasonably affordable way is via .torrent files, which is why the archive was handled this way so far.
For years, though, we've looked for a way to "legitimize" the service, moving it somewhere that it could be streamed and downloaded on a one-by-one basis, so that it could truly fulfill its original purpose.
Now we've found our friends at Pony.fm!
Ponyville Live will officially be transitioning the MLPMA to be hosted by Pony.fm and maintained as part of their platform. We have a small team of maintainers, many of whom will still be helping to maintain the archive as it exists on pony.fm.
Another group of maintainers has also expressed interest in keeping their own "fork" of the classic MLPMA and maintaining it independently. They will be keeping their copy of the archive and updating it from there, but this won't be an official PVL / Poniverse supported project.
Why Pony.fm?
Besides our long-standing partnership with Poniverse, there were other technical factors that played into our choice to work with Pony.fm for the MLP Music Archive project. Namely, those were:
Pony.fm's existing API, allowing PVL and other sites to easily reference the songs contained in the site's database;
The very active status of the Pony.fm codebase, and the relative ease of modifying the existing platform to support the MLPMA; and
The lightweight and easy-to-use web interface, which has already implemented the somewhat tricky task of allowing music playback to continue seamlessly while you navigate the site.
We began talking with the Poniverse folks about this several months ago, but we were finally able to hash out the specifics at this year's BABScon in San Francisco. It's only fitting that by the time the next big West coast pony convention rolled around, they were ready to announce it.
What happens now?
After Pony.fm finishes its migration of the now-giant MLPMA and gets it set up inside its system, the Pony.fm site will quickly become the "authoritative" source of music in the pony community. Not only will it have lossless copies of music uploaded by artists directly to the service, but it'll have just about any pony song you can find, and some you can't find anywhere else!
We intend to continue working very closely with them to keep the archive current, and adding even more integration into the Ponyville Live site and API. Stay tuned as we announce new fun things that relate to this.
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