qnch

Three services

Three services, no platforms

Three separate things, each doing one job. None of them is a platform, and none of them stands between you and the people listening.

The parts

What each one does

They're built to work together, but they aren't one product wearing three names.

  1. Station

    the service

    The software you run on your own server. It holds your music, your catalog, your storefront, your fan club and your treasury, and serves all of it from a machine you pay for and nobody else can reach into. One command installs it; the whole thing takes about ten minutes.

    Self-hosting, without the part where you also have to build a website.

  2. qnch

    the network

    DIY and platforms sit at opposite ends of one spectrum: self-hosting keeps your control and strands you on a website nobody visits, while a platform makes you findable and takes the rest in exchange. qnch is what lets you stand at both ends at once. There is nothing extra to run — it works inside Station, from the moment your server is up. Artist servers find each other on their own, so a fan can search your handle in one app and land on you, with no platform database in the middle.

    The network knows where to find you, not what you have. No central index, no central copy.

  3. FanSociety

    fan clubs

    A patronage service designed specifically for musicians and their fans. No subscriptions; instead, a one time donation gets you in the Fan Club and timestamps when you joined. Artists can use this information to give back to their fans in a number of ways.

    Gated access to albums and songs is a feature that is available from day one.

The shape

Why this isn't a platform

You could already self-host your music without any of this. The reason very few do is that it's not scalable.

Asking listeners to visit twenty different sites, with twenty different layouts, to hear twenty different bands keeps DIY permanently niche. The convenience is real, and a platform is what usually supplies it — at the price of sitting in the middle of every transaction you'll ever make.

qnch supplies the convenience without occupying the middle. Your server is still yours; it's just also a participant in a network that knows how to find it. Fans get one app and one search box. You get the catalog, the prices, the money and the machine.

That's the whole trick, and it's the reason none of these three services needs to become a company that owns your audience.

Centralized platform
One company, one catalog
Artists don't run a server. The platform does, and it takes a large cut for running the infrastructure, including the database that routes every request.
A
B
C
Platform
Content database
Servers
Audio
Search artist
App
DIY self-hosting
Every artist a website
The artist runs the server and the site. More control for the artist, worse experience for listeners.
A
Server
B
Server
C
Server
Site A
Site B
Site C
Station on qnch
Novel hybrid model
Artist runs server. Maximum control for artists, maintain convenient access for listeners.
A
B
C
Server
Server
Server
qnch network — every server is a participant
Audio
Search artist
One app
network architecture — solid lines carry audio, dashed lines carry names, boxes mark what belongs to whom

Division of labour

What's yours, and what isn't

The right-hand column is deliberately short. It's the entire list of things the network does on your behalf.

Yours The network's
The server, and the bill for it Resolving your namespace to your node
The music files themselves —
Your catalog, your prices, your gating —
The address revenue is paid to —
Your namespace, once it is claimed —
Uptime —

The trade

Nobody else holds a copy

If your server is off, your music is unavailable. Not deleted — unavailable.

While your node is down, fans can't stream, buy or download from you. When it comes back, everything resumes exactly where it was.

That's the cost of owning your distribution outright: no one can take your music down, and no one can keep it up for you either.

It's also the practical argument for a cheap VPS that stays on over a laptop that goes to sleep. Uptime is now a thing you own.