[PaulHoule]

Here's an almost trivial bit of "permissionless innovation" thanks to Silicon Valley giants:

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/111049822586450100

30 years ago somebody who wanted to develop a "new object you can use to distribute music" had to spend $100 million on some project like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette

today it is very simple because almost everyone has a player in their pocket that connects the card to software which runs in the cloud. It wouldn't be technically difficult at all for me to host the music file in S3, R2 or Azure storage and the storage and network costs are insignificant so far as I expect these cards to be distributed. If I did that I could get in trouble over copyright, so a link to YouTube is a safe and easy solution w/ the disadvantage that people in many geographies can't view licensed music videos.

Fortunately that QR code is a redirect and I can send it to another service. I demoed the cards with quite a few people and found that they usually felt it was a letdown to go to YouTube (maybe because they go to YouTube all the time and there is nothing special about it) but that there was more satisfaction with a link to SongWhip which might send them to YouTUbe in the end but gives them a feeling of agency at the expense of another click.

[rchaud]

I'm confused, what is the innovation here? A QR code that points to a Youtube URL and doesn't work without Internet?

From the 1960s-80s magazines came with "flexidiscs" which could play entire songs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexi_disc

[dbtc]

I've been imagining making song/album cards for a long time now! Just like that! Very nice.

[mattl]

CD Baby and others have sold these cards for people putting music on their services for a while.