Technology

Doesn't have to he illegal at all. Plenty of freely shared music out there, and some with less restrictive licenses.

And this is enforced how? By having a whitelist of file hashes for songs that can be legally shared in this way? At that point just set up a server for streaming/downloading those files... except that already exists with their existing free distribution methods.

Not copy them, simply stream them.

Licensing still applies, and technically you're still providing a download by streaming with no drm.

What if we collectively bought the music and lent it out in library fashion?

I'd love for the money to materialize for that but it's a pipe dream, and still likely has licensing concerns more complicated than you're expecting. At that point you're only a few steps from spotify again as well, as the costs of infrastructure for providing this service would not be anywhere close to as cheap as hosting for primarily text based servers. The money has to come from somewhere.

Beyond all that, federation doesn't come into the concepts you're suggesting yet at all. The only benefit to federation of this would be to spread the base files across more servers.

Additionally, you can totally share your music library with whoever you want already via a decent number of self-hostable media servers. Can even do the streaming only option that you seem to think would somehow make it legally more viable.

I refuse to give up having control because of stupid backwards laws.

And there it is! Yo ho, yo ho...

For context, my home lemmy instance is dbzero, the piracy instance. Yarr!

I guess I'm just trying to point out that if you don't care about laws or being caught, you can already do exactly what you're asking for fairly easily.

If you only care to share with specific trusted friends, those options work fine too as you won't be caught.

If you simply don't want to be caught, laws be damned, there's options like soulseek, or maybe hosting a file or media server on Tor.

If you do care about laws and not having the music industry coming for your ass, then you should probably give up on this project as there's too much money invested in the status quo to challenge it.

And ultimately, federation doesn't solve any of the issues with music sharing or streaming except maybe keeping the media available while just giving more targets for legal action.

Tl;dr- federation is a tool with uses and limitations like any other tool, not a magic "make the internet better" button