Hello there! We’ve been incorporating updates related to Knightune into our regular news updates, or “Knowledge” posts, which are usually more related to Gensokyo Radio. Since this is a slightly deeper dive into what we’ve got planned with Knightune, we’ve split out the details into this separate thread where your questions and comments are welcome.
First, it’s important to note that this is a rough roadmap and we aren’t working with strict timelines due to the fact that there’s a lot of other stuff happening while this project is under development. It’s also interesting to note that the projects we’ve given some sort of codename to over the years have a history of being shelved (Megane, Spectrum, April, and Calendar), and they all have their reasons for being shelved, but Knightune is a project we have every intention of moving forward with because of its potential impact on artists. With that said, the priority and speed of developing Knightune is likely to vary over time.
To help our audience understand where we’re at in development and identify times at which you might be able to get involved or help out, we’ve divided project development into a few phases:
- Phase 1: The primary website will become public for information and account creation. Artists will be able to directly apply for verification and become founding artists for a limited time. Once verified, artists will be able to start forming bands, inviting collaborators, uploading media, and filling in information.
- Phase 2: A usable application will be made available in some form (web app, Windows app, Android/iOS, etc) for testing by a small group of users. This will allow users to listen and artists to see statistics based on listener activity. The system will be usable, but may not be fully featured or have a finalized design.
- Phase 3: The platform will be launched, subscriptions will be required to listen, and artists will start getting paid. Development will still continue after reaching this milestone, but the major components will be available and the design will be finalized.
To summarize, Phase 1 will be primarily artist-focused, Phase 2 will be primarily listener-focused, and Phase 3 will effectively launch the platform publicly. During each phase, we’ll be opening up different areas to different users and focusing heavily on user feedback from both artist and listener perspectives during development. This will be critical in allowing us to make adjustments and tune the platform to be the best we can make it before launch.
Working on Gensokyo Radio for over 14 years has given me a unique perspective when it comes to independent artists who often just want to get their projects out in front of an audience. However, when it comes to the way music is consumed in the current era, streaming is king, and streaming on the big platforms is less friendly and less accessible to smaller and independent artists. It’s this fact that helped form the basic idea behind Knightune.
I want this project to help artists and listeners form more direct connections so that listeners can better support the people they listen to, and artists can more directly feel that support without worrying about arbitrary requirements from platforms or third-party publishers. We’ve got the core idea for what we want this platform to be, but by working with artists and listeners during this process, we hope to cover more use cases that we haven’t considered. Music production and publication is a complicated process, and we want to help make at least some of that process easier.
Please let us know what you think or if you have questions, and stick around for more updates related to development progress. Thanks!