After a 100-episode run, I stopped producing my music podcast, Sats and Sounds (the site will remain up for some time). I billed it as one of the first Value4Value (V4V) music podcasts on the internet, and it was. Boostagram Ball predates my show, but not by much. I launched in August 2023 with a simple three-track format until I settled on a format that worked for me. I ended up creating a nine-track, roughly 30-minute weekly podcast featuring new music posted to what’s called the ValueVerse. Before I get into why I quit, let me explain why I started.
Here’s the tl;dr, I ended the show because I was unable to keep up with the technological changes and it was no longer enjoyable to find new music.
In the paragraphs below, I’ll talk a lot about technologies I don’t fully understand. Though I managed to use them and get things working, some details may not be entirely accurate. What follows is my understanding of the technologies involved.
V4V is a concept where podcast listeners actively contribute one of the “Three Ts”: Time, Talent, or Treasure. Since I self-produced and self-hosted my podcast, I didn’t need much of others’ time or talent. Treasure, however, was different. Contributors to the Podcast Index developed a technology called valueTimeSplits, which uses a tag in the Podcast Namespace that allows creators to receive direct payments via a Lightning wallet (Lightning is a layer of Bitcoin) as their content is played. This works for both live-streamed podcasts and downloads. I wanted to see if I could make it work, because if I could, anyone with some technical know-how and a willingness to experiment could do it too. I saw it as a new way for people creating content to make money from that content while bypassing gatekeepers like Patreon, PayPal, Apple, and Spotify. You have to trust in Bitcoin though.
Bitcoin is where my frustrations began. To be “sovereign” (i.e., have full control over your funds), you need to host your own Bitcoin and Lightning nodes. You can accomplish the same thing other ways, but it’s not the same as having near-total control over your Satoshis (a fraction of a Bitcoin, like a penny to a dollar—not in value, but as a smaller unit). I ended up hosting my own node using a Start9 server, after trying others. The Start9 was simple and far more stable. The podcast was going well, but then I heard rumblings of changes coming to how V4V payments would be processed. Bear with me, this is going to get deep into the weeds.
The Podcast Namespace originally embraced a technology of the Lightning Network called Keysend. The Lightning Network is relatively user-friendly (aside from liquidity which is an entirely different animal and is fodder for a separate blog post), with near-instant payments, unlike transacting on the Bitcoin Blockchain, where fees are higher and confirmation takes time. With the Lightning Network, you’re dealing in micropayments—sometimes just a few cents rather than dollars. For example, as of the moment I write this, $1.00 equals about 855 Satoshis (or sats for short). If someone sends 500 sats, that’s roughly a little over $0.50—not worth transacting on the Blockchain.
Keysend requires a node ID, which you’d include in the value block or valueTimeSplit tag of your RSS feed. Listeners using a podcast app enabled with this technology can instantly send sats, enabling what’s called streaming payments. There is also a Boost feature, where listeners can send extra sats if they particularly liked something, and a Boostagram, which is a Boost with a message, allowing direct interaction with the podcaster. It is very cool.
Developers are deprecating Keysend in favor of LNURL. Instead of a node ID (a string of numbers), LNURL uses an address that, confusingly, looks like an email address. For the average person unfamiliar with cryptocurrency, this may be confusing. I don’t fully understand how LNURL works, nor can I figure out how to integrate it with my self-hosted node. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to support Boosts or Boostagrams with LNURL. Since I can’t make it work, I don’t want to risk playing music without making sure artists can get paid. My attempts to learn about LNURL led me to another technology: Nostr.
Nostr is sort of like a federated version of Twitter with cryptocurrency integration. I have a Nostr npub (public key) and can communicate on the network, but I don’t fully understand how it works, how crypto ties into it, or how to integrate it with my podcast. I was receiving messages from Nostr over Mastodon (another federated Twitter-like product). and some of them were replies to other posts. But, I couldn’t figure out how to find out what the original post was to know the context of the reply. The technology is changing too fast, and I was already out over my skis and I didn’t want to get out any further.
Beyond the crypto tech, there was the issue of sourcing music. There are only a few places to find V4V-enabled music. The biggest is Wavlake, a platform where artists upload music and collect sats via a crypto wallet managed by the service. Wavlake takes a cut, which I don’t mind. Then there are smaller players like RSS Blue, which partnered with the V4V-enabled app Fountain. They host artists’ music and, I believe, create crypto wallets for them. There’s also Music Side Project, a highly independent option for artists who want maximum sovereignty.
I found new tracks through LNBeats.com, built by StevenB (who also created Music Side Project). It aggregates music by searching the Podcast Index, making it easy to find new tracks. At first, I would find more music than I could play in my nine-track show every week.
In the last month or two of my show, finding new music became difficult. I found most of the tracks I played at Wavlake, but they began allowing a flood of supposed Nigerian and South African artists to upload. I say “supposed” because there’s no way to verify if someone is uploading pirated music they don’t own the rights to. This has happened before, and in music licensing, one misstep can lead to hefty fines from big licensing firms. Even if the music was legit, the volume of tracks being uploaded felt like spam, as if people were posting hundreds of tracks in order to collect small amounts of sats. Post enough tracks and it could add up to real money. Sorting through all those tracks became cumbersome and time-consuming. For my 100th and final show, I was lucky to find three new tracks. I was glad to play a few more “Freshly Rendered Bits”—my catchphrase that never caught on.
To end my long sob story, I ended Sats and Sounds because I couldn’t keep up with the technological changes, and finding new music stopped being enjoyable. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
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