Freq out

Greetings. I write you winded, stumbling over the finish line from what has been a marathon developing Freq. I did not train for this marathon, and I am not a runner. I always figured someone else would build the software and I'd just be the design and community dude. Oh well.

Freq (pronounced "freak", short for "frequency") is a social media site purpose built for community-centered music discovery. You can post what you're currently listening to, follow other users, like and comment on their posts, and share collections.  It’s a lot of fun so far, and I’m honestly amazed by how little time and how few beta testers it took before I started finding out about really cool stuff I had never heard of before.

The tools are simple, which makes them flexible. Collections are great for keeping track of things you want to listen to, collaborating with friends to highlight a favorite genre, or providing more information about selections from your recent DJ mix or radio show—among many, many other things.

This project has been developed in two pretty unusual ways.

First, lots and lots of research has gone into it. While I've been working at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst (where I also produce our really good podcast Reimagining the Internet), I've conducted ethnographic and historical research into how people use and have used the Internet to talk about and find music. This software is shaped by that research.

It's also informed by my life in underground music as a touring and recording musician, music writer, show organizer, and passionate enthusiast. I have a very different set of experiences, and therefore perspective and set of values, than someone from a tech background who might be trying to build a similar tool.

Mine is a hugely different approach than the "killer app" model of development in Silicon Valley. Unlike the web 2.0 wave of "innovators", I'm not some business weirdo claiming to be a genius developing software that will revolutionize the world. I’d rather puke out every single one of my organs than become a “benevolent dictator for life.” I think the world needs less tech innovation and a lot more people talking to each other and getting creative together. 

My main philosophy here is really “don’t reinvent the wheel.” The structure of the whole thing is similar to Letterboxd—the excellent film-cataloging site. Your profile can show your top eight albums just like the old "Top 8" friends on MySpace. Collections are based on What.CD collages and resonate with the channel functionality offered by our friends at Are.na. All of Freq’s metadata comes from MusicBrainz and we’re totally dependent on the excellent structure of its database and the decades of work volunteer contributors have put into filling it with high quality information about music.

I strive to make Freq’s design process minimally top-down, so I’m working hard to create features with actual music communities. In the world of corporate social media, "community" is a euphemism for "users we harvest data from." But music has actual communities that exist offline. One place is around college and community radio stations.

Non-commercial community radio is really cool. And I don’t just feel that way because the legendary WFMU opened up my world while I was a kid growing up in central New Jersey, or because I met some of my dearest friends through college radio. 

We don't usually think of America as a place with much public media, but non-commercial radio is a really vibrant, widespread form of public broadcasting that's free to access and brought to life by your neighbors’ voices and music tastes. And considering that a lot of non-commercial community radio is college radio, it means this popular public broadcast model is largely stewarded by young people. That’s a really special thing. 

My theory of the case is that if I can collaborate with people at community radio stations to build features for Freq, we can develop software that will be valuable to actual, specific music communities. Starting at the end of this month, I'm running a co-design workshop with student DJs at UMass's WMUA, where I'll provide structure for them to design features for Freq that are useful to their station and local music community. 

Going back to collections, some early conversation with student DJs at WMUA has suggested that we might want to build a tool that makes it easy for them to represent the international music CDs in the station’s stacks in a nice, easily browsable collection so DJs reared on Spotify can navigate that archive for their shows. It's important to me that this process be as equitable and minimally extractive as possible, so the students are being compensated for their time with gift cards and food.

I'll admit I run the risk that the features we design there are so specific to UMass or the Five Colleges area that they're useless to everyone else. Granted, I am working to expand this co-design work to other stations in other places too, thanks in part to the help of a grant from the Trust for Civic Life (huge shout out for Global Voices for acting as fiscal sponsor). But on principal, if this software is relevant and actually valuable to some group of people using it because they had some say in how it was made, I'm pretty happy with this project overall. 

Freq does not need to be everything for everyone. And I hope it's also not the only new music-focused project online that succeeds. There are other new social projects that are trying to fill a similar need: Freakscene for local DIY shows, Record Club and Musicboard for Yelp- or Fragrantica-like reviews, as kind of a next generation of the Rate Your Music model.

I genuinely hope we all figure it out and make it work because, like I've written before, we use the Internet in an extremely strange moment where there aren't really purpose-built spaces for people to talk about music. The center of gravity are marketplaces like Spotify, Bandcamp, and Discogs or general purpose software built by ultra-wealthy corporations like Discord or Reddit. It's as if the only places to see music were at a Live Nation venue with bad sound and $10 bottled water or that weird little stage in the basement of the mall. 

Here’s the bigger picture: this project was developed at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, an academic lab at UMass Amherst studying, broadly, public interest on the Internet. One of our long-running projects has been prototyping social software for the public good, spun up in line with our "Three-Legged Stool" vision for building a better, more user-centered web by innovating socially, not technologically.

I would love for Freq’s design and development process to help people figure out how to develop social media software democratically. It would be great if Freq succeeds and becomes a model for other projects, but I'd also be happy with people looking at my project and gaining insights into how they could do it better for their own communities around their specific needs.

We are living at a moment when one of the people dismantling the modern structures of our government—institutions, processes, and entitlements developed through decades of democratic processes—also owns a social media platform. And seems like he developed his techniques for fucking up our government with a trial run fucking up the website he bought. My colleague Nathan Schneider has an idea that he wrote about in his book Governable Spaces that democracy is something we strengthen by practicing it in everyday ways, but conversely, we can become desensitized to a lack of democracy by spending so much time in undemocratic spaces online.

So, one idea of how we can build spaces democratically online is working with real communities offline. That means soliciting their input meaningfully, giving them a structure to have a real stake in the process, and compensating them for their work, too. Serving these communities well stands as the ultimate imperative. The incentives are simple: their well-being and happiness. Financial sustainability can come from that process, but profit need not be the mission.

I know this is possible because of what my colleagues at Are.na and Front Porch Forum and Pinboard have managed to pull off. These are folks running things online that serve a specific purpose for specific people, and are only interested in making sure their software serves them better and better.

Why did I build this?

As an active recording and touring musician, I’m super inspired by the moments I encounter when music and people’s love for it is most alive, like an incredible show my friend Icky Reels and the groupwork rave crew hooked up for my band in Buffalo, NY a few weeks ago. I think music culture needs a shot in the arm at the moment, and firmly believe we could use a lot more of people getting together in the flesh, connected by incredible sounds.

As someone who isn’t a software developer, I’m not really inspired by software.

My only real experience building software prior to this was making Max/MSP patches for my live performances. I grew up around computers thanks to my dad's job at the Digital Equipment Corporation and use them a lot for my creative life making music and writing. But I'm not particularly enchanted by computers. I think code is actually the most degenerate form of writing our species has devised yet: it either works or it doesn't. If it is beautiful, its beauty lives in contempt of poetry's soul and storytelling's humanity. There are few things I encounter in a given week as depressing as a machine telling me if my writing is successful.

So how did I end up developing a social media website from scratch? Well, if I'm being honest, I wouldn't have if there were a pre-rolled solution for spinning up a social media site like there is for a blog or a message board.¹

I was hot on the heels of redesigning iDPI’s website and so frustrated with customizing a Wordpress theme for it that I figured bringing Bocoup’s mockups for Freq to life couldn’t be that hard. After talking it over with my friend and former labmate Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, I decided that Sveltekit and Supabase made things easy enough on the front- and backend that a dilettante like myself could spin up something.²

The reality is those tools made it possible but not fun. Bugs swarm around my visual dyslexia and building software by myself while working remotely was extremely lonely. I couldn’t shake questions like “who is asking for this?” and “if I care about music, why am I building software?” Unfortunately I have a bad habit of finishing literally anything I start.

But what kept me going was a sense—one that I’d get from talking to friends and fellow travelers in music—that I was building something that probably should exist, that it would be a useful set of tools to people who care about what I care about, and that it’s better I was building it than someone angling to sell it to Spotify. After all, I have a lot of personal history that goes into building Freq.

Freq is the endpoint of a broader project I've been pursuing for a long time. I had a unique opportunity and supportive environment to build it at iDPI—thanks in massive part to the trust and confidence of my boss and friend Ethan Zuckerman.

Since about 2017, I've been trying to figure out how to make the Internet a more useful resource for in-person, offline, grassroots music communities. I was really shook by the Ghost Ship fire in December, 2016 since I had spent years at that point working in, booking shows at, or playing DIY venues. I knew how shoddy the electrical situation was in a lot of them, and how safety was too often an afterthought. 

So I started a project called Groove Café in 2017 to collect and share information about fire safety that would be useful for anyone involved in a DIY space. I wasn't the only person with this idea and I quickly found various Google Docs and blog posts with general safety guidelines as well as local resources that people would pass around. So I figured Groove Café could be a kind of hub that collected all of these distributed resources people were making, and by sharing them, also highlight the grassroots work happening in scenes all over the place. And then fire safety materials lead to posting safe space practices, which lead to trying to highlight scene archivists. And so on and so forth.

I ended up pretty interested in this question of how the Internet could be valuable for real music communities, since the Internet was quickly mutating into something that put musicians and the people who fill our lives with music last, not first. For example, I loved the thriving music blogosphere of the late aughts and early 2010s, but by the time everyone got a Spotify account, an entire writing and music culture had gone up in smoke. Given the history of the Internet as a place where music communities not only flourished but helped define a lot of its social vocabulary (something I focus on in this here personal research blog), I found it really weird that communities were being squeezed out.

So, when I did my masters in the MIT Comparative Media Studies program from 2019 through 2021—where I worked as a research assistant in Ethan’s then-lab, the Center for Civic Media—I researched how DIY communities rapidly shifted to throwing shows on Twitch during the lockdown period of COVID. 

What I realized was—among the billion other plights of independent music these days—music doesn't have any purpose-built social spaces online these days. Sure, music communities had cropped up on Twitch and Reddit and Discord and Instagram, but those are places where music culture has to bend to the imperatives and incentives of products manufactured by megacorporations.

I couldn't stop wondering what a social site for music would look like if it were built according to the needs of music and the people who care about it most instead. So I've spent the past three years at iDPI conducting ethnographic and history research into how people use and have used the Internet to gather around music, I did a few rounds of interviews and user testing with students at WMUA, I collaborated with Bocoup on coming up with an accessible design for the site, and I started this blog I'm really really bad at maintaining about the history of music community online.

And I also put like a year of work into developing Freq myself. I really don't like software development, but I really like music and people. So I'm really excited to finally get some people using this thing.

Come hang out on Freq! If you're a regular old music fan: have fun, submit bug reports, let me know what you think. If you're at a non-commercial community or college radio station—or hell, even a public broadcaster in a different country—let's talk about interesting work we could do together. If you're someone who wants to help support this work as it transitions this summer from a project hosted at an academic lab to an independent one with a sustainable, ethical revenue stream, let's talk. 

Request an invite here and I’ll approve you pretty fast: https://freq.social/welcome/invite-request 

What I’ve been listening to

Simply getting my damn mind blown by the new Chuquimamani-Condori album. Just a totally singular trans indigenous artist making electronic music that sounds like standing on a corner in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic and listening to all the music blaring from the cars. Love a healthy dose of “what the hell is this?” Yeah… uh, Norteño?

Been getting into Broken Beat.

I like normal music too.

1  By the way, I'm hoping to develop some set of open source tools for that type of thing that I'd spin out of the Freq code base. If you are the type of person who would like to support that work, please get in touch.

2  I didn’t use any AI tools in the process, mainly because I wanted to have an intimate understanding of how my tool works under the hood, but also because I don’t really trust them.