Fountain 0.8 - Music Podcasts (Beta), Player Updates & Performance Upgrades
Listeners can now discover and support artists by exploring an exciting new category of music podcasts powered by Value for Value
Music Podcasts (Beta)
While there are many podcasts that talk about music, there are very few which actually feature full-length tracks because securing the rights is so complex and expensive. That’s all about to change thanks to the latest developments in Podcasting 2.0, paving the way for a brand new category of music podcasts where DJs can play tracks and artists get paid directly by the audience as they listen on their podcast app.
The first music podcast of this kind is Boostagram Ball by Adam Curry. Every Friday, Adam plays a selection of tracks which artists have published to an RSS feed and made available in open libraries like PodcastIndex and Wavlake. The money sent via boosts and streams flows directly to the artist and listeners can add the tracks they liked to their Fountain library to listen to again later.
If you’re wondering how this works, Fountain 0.8 supports two new tags from the Podcast Namespace that makes it possible:
The <podcast:medium> tag allows the podcast host to specify the type of content contained within the RSS feed. If the medium is specified as music, we label it accordingly in Fountain search and deliver a more bespoke user experience for listening to music.
The <podcast:valueTimeSplit> tag allows the podcast host to specify the value recipient for a certain period of time during an episode. In other words, the splits change dynamically depending on which track is currently playing and the money listeners send gets paid directly to the artist.
You can learn more about this emerging category of music podcasts by listening to Adam Curry's interview with Podnews Weekly Review. There are also more music podcasts like Adam’s available on Fountain, which you can find out about here. Give them a listen and try it out for yourself!
If you would like to make your music available so it can be featured in podcasts or you’re looking to include music in your podcast, we would highly recommend watching this tutorial from Kyrin Down.
Player Updates
We have made two small but significant updates to the player screen, making two important features accessible in fewer taps.
You can now view and manage your queue directly from the player screen. We also had feedback from users that queued items were not playing in the correct order, so we fixed that and added some labels for “now playing” and “next in queue”.
For podcasts that have provided chapters, you can now see which chapter you are currently listening to and open up the panel to skip to another chapter without leaving the player screen.
Performance Upgrades
The new update brings about some improvements in performance, so you should notice that running the app on your mobile device consumes less data and less power.
While we're continuing to work on further improvements, these updates represent a substantial leap forward in quality of life.
Your feedback helps us make Fountain better. If you’re experiencing any issues, please share them with us via the main menu in the app.
Want to help test new features before they get released? Join Fountain Beta on Telegram to get access. All iOS and Android users welcome.